The main coach station in Sao Paulo, waiting to get on my coach back to Rio. I had taken a seat by a snack bar and I watched for seconds as a girl walked up to the cash register and ordered, and she was quite attractive. She got some food and came over and sat at the next table.
Now, throughout my life, I’ve always had, say, “lucky breaks” (bear with me) around girls that I was attracted to. In school, when the teachers would set everybody’s proper seats across the classroom, I somehow always happened to get the seat right next to the girl I was infatuated with at the time; even in high school, once, when it was a bit ridiculous for students to have their proper seats, the teachers must have decided to do it because we were especially mischievous, and, guess what, same thing happened again. It has reached the point where I can almost count on it.
So I thought “if I’m really supposed to meet her, I need not worry, surely she’ll just happen to be getting on the same coach as me, to Rio…”. So I went to the cash machine at the same time she left and went on her way to wherever. About an hour later, I get to where the coach is meant to be and who is leaning on the wall waiting for the coach? The same girl. No surprises yet. But I’m afraid you need a pretty good excuse to just walk up to a girl without looking like a jerk. That’s where chance should help. Sadly, I could not have the seat right next to this one, because mine was the stupid sleeper seat and of course no one in their mind would book the sleeper seat for a 6-hour ride from 3:30pm to 9:30pm, my fellow sleepers were certainly a bit silly like myself.
Three and a half hours into the journey, we have a stop, I buy myself a can of guarana. Back by the coach, I head to the door and notice that it is raining. I don’t know what was so interesting about that, but I turned around and walked across the front of the coach to look at the rain. Then just as I’m turning back to get into the coach again, I see the girl again, she’s wandering around eating some snack, and looking at me with the corner of her eye. My head then fails to follow the rest of my body and I just narrowly miss the wing mirror of the next coach with my head. Very smooth. I get back into the coach and pretend like I’m doing something for a moment, and then get out again, the girl has walked to the left side of the coach, I take a couple of steps and pretend like I’m looking at the rain, and now she gets behind the coach. Then I, very inconspicuously, walk back to the door and the girl is gone. She went around the coach and got back into it, she ran away from me!
Could my gender have earned such a pathetic reputation that women can actually run away at the first sign of “danger”? I think of my parakeets and being annoyed by how the male just won’t leave the female alone for even a second, constantly in an exchange of bickering and nibbling the moment she comes out of her nestbox. Guys are such petty pricks, really. But some of us do the best they can.
Look at nature for some solidly irrelevant social insight. The peacock obviously has it way easier than us. Or do they? I wonder if there are any peacocks that neglect to work on their tail and instead perfect a wonderful tune, or learn to peck on wood. And do they singing and woodpecking peacocks ever get to be happy even if no sane woman peacock will be looking for their kind? You’d think there are woman peacocks that could appreciate good music. What were we meant to do originally, before we got all civilized? Were we made to dance? Clap our hands rhythmically? Burp really loud? Decorate our surroundings? Is that what they were doing when they were drawing on the walls in their caves? Could that be the original deviant males trying to come up with new revolutionary ways to attract mates?
The real problem is that the puzzle is actually a very hard one for us to solve. To chat someone up is to try to generate as much confusion and diversion as possible, trying to get around the plainness of the reason you’re there being that you are physically attracted, it’s a real contradiction. In your head you’re trying to come up with a bunch of compelling justifications, or attaching it to rituals to make it look really legitimate, some will take it as a kind of sport, others will surround it with great magic and wonder, the peacock will just lift up his tail and everyone will say “oooooh!” in pure amazement at the advent of “love, pure and true”.
But then what if it doesn’t work and no one is impressed? We guys, especially when we’re young, will self-righteously complain about how the world is unfair because we did everything we understood that we were supposed to do yet did not earn the right to the woman that we wanted, completely and unwittingly ignoring the existence of the woman’s free will in the situation. Sort of like that man that works all week to support the household and then comes home and complains that his wife hasn’t cooked him dinner. They both are giving up their free will. Man to work, woman to family. Who ever wants that burden? The woman’s free will is, to man, as alien as make-up, menstruation, birth control, menopause, all things that men have nothing to do with. And to men, far more important than having a free will of their own is having a woman of their own.
We human beings have clearly fallen into this mad pit of complexities, subtleties and consequences, where things seem to rest a lot more on chance than on performance. I can’t really crack my head. Good things tend to happen often when you fail to prevent them. I will tell myself that as she went around the coach and lept back into it, cleverly elluding me, she remembered a man that she was already committed to, and knew that she could not allow a chance to fall in love with me, lest she might break her lover’s heart. And by tomorrow morning I will completely believe it. But if it’s really meant to be, I’m gonna go out for a coffee tomorrow and she’s gonna be sitting at the next table, in such a way that there will be no other choice but contact. And if she’s not there, it’s because it was not meant to be and it has not been.

