"Missed Connections" by Jamie Kahn
It was only after I moved to New York that I started to read the missed connections ads for my hometown. I was first alerted to their existence when I was a teenager and a friend of mine who’d gone off to college confessed to me that he sometimes liked to read the posts for the area around his campus. Nothing ever came of it for him, but it didn’t stop me from forming my own romantic idea of missed connections.
Living in a small east coast town, I immediately resolved that nothing interesting ever happened where I was from. Right away, I moved on to bigger cities. I sat in my bedroom during lonely college nights, scrolling through the New Yorkers and Angelenos who had missed their soul mates by an inch in their massive cities. People stuck in traffic by someone’s side for an hour on the freeway and people glancing across the rumbling cart of the A train, unable to get the names and numbers they so desperately longed for. What do you do when you can’t get someone off your mind in a city of millions? You post on Craigslist, that’s what.
The descriptions I read on these pages always made me flutter. Everybody has unique taste, and no website in the world tells it better than Craigslist. From Seattle to LA, people don’t have time to mess around with flattery. The headlines often point out the most recognizable features of the writers’ object of affection in searing detail.
Hairy dude from the L train, 8:30pm Saturday.
Big girl with the cheek piercings, Silver Lake.
Older gentleman, slightly balding, jean jacket, ACE line.
Lady with long hair down to her butt, Whole Foods.
Hot dad from Vons holding a baby, pink shirt, frozen food aisle.
14th St. lady with curly hair.
You gave me your business card but I lost it, UES.
There’s something flavorful about having to accurately describe the person you want to catch. I never tired of the specifics. The colorful linguistic acrobatics people would venture just to weed their would-be lover out from the masses. It always made me wonder how somebody would describe me. Or how I would describe a person who caught my eye enough to make me post an ad. Somehow, I always had a feeling that if anything it would be the latter. I’m more often a writer than a muse.
From the comfort of my little bedroom in my little town, I read the fleeting brushes of fate from the world’s lovesick population. I got drunk on the romance of it, but it was a bit sad at the same time. I couldn’t help but wonder, how often did these posts actually result in a connection, let alone a real love story? I knew that for many, those connections would stay missed. They’d be a girl who didn’t respond to the ad, or a guy on the train who seemed sweet, whose number you wish you’d gotten.
Soon enough, I got bored of the missed connections. Like true crime and rock climbing, it was something I grew out of. I moved to New York City and became one of those people on the train, sometimes looking my best, other times looking awful. And it happened to be one of those days when I was looking awful that I became the subject of a missed connection of my own.
After visiting some family back home for a long weekend, I was sunburnt, frizzy-haired, and sweaty as I leaned on the pole of the L train after an hour on NJ Transit and a transfer. Across the train, I spotted a cute guy with glasses, a dark t-shirt, and a beige messenger bag. I tried to be subtle with my glances, but I don’t usually do well with subtlety. He looked sweet and interesting and mysterious, but I got off at Montrose and only took one look back.
I can’t pinpoint exactly why, but the next morning, I twitched with an urge. I logged onto New York City’s missed connections page, and sure enough, I saw myself described in one of those lively headlines, stretched out in black text for the world to see. It felt surreal, almost like I was imagining it all. It seemed like a randomized improbability. A shark attack, a lightning strike. A falling coconut. I was a missed connection, and I actually had the power to do something about it.
I sat there for a moment, unsure how to take this newfound knowledge. I was so new here, spat out into the giant pool of people in which I was sure nobody would notice me. I operated under the assumption that no one was watching what I did. Why would they, in a city of so many? I stared at this character study of myself, detailing my New Yorker tote bag and “cute” appearance—my curls and torn vintage Levis. This person didn’t just look at me—they paid attention to every detail.
These things always seemed so fragmented before. Something for the broader ether of the internet to watch from afar while we all slipped through the fingertips of those around us. Now, it almost felt too easy to reach out and take the moment back. All the same, I knew nothing about this guy. Perhaps even less than I could when he’d been standing right in front of me. In my rumination, I wanted council. A detour. An innocent distraction. So I did something I never thought I’d do in my life.
I looked up the missed connections page for the town where I grew up. After years of reading through the big-city brushes of glances on trains and meet-cutes in bars and on street corners, all culminating in forlorn specificity, I got curious about whether there even was a missed connections page where I came from. As it turned out, there was.
The page for my hometown were softer, gentler. It left a bit of space for elbow room. Rather than the sharp details of some cutie from the subway, the headlines were much more likely to feature a conversation from the checkout line at the supermarket, someone’s coffee order from a local café, or even details of friends from bygone eras in attempts to reconnect.
One ad was written by a man trying to find a specific checkout girl at Wawa. They flirted almost every day when he came in for a pack of cigarettes and an energy drink on his way to work, but she stopped working there, and he’d never gotten the chance to ask for her number.
Another ad was from a teenage boy, in search of a lady with long, grey hair. When he held the door open for her at the dollar store, she thanked him and told him how handsome he was, and his anxiety stopped him from thanking her back. “If this is you or maybe your grandma, please tell her thank you for me!” He wrote.
One woman who grew up in the area, only to move away and return later in life, recalled a friendship with a classmate and wanted to reach out. They went to different colleges in 1973 and lost touch. She’d tried asking around, plus searching Facebook, and even Twitter and Instagram, but she couldn’t find anything about her.
Another ad was written by a man in his 60s, a lifelong local. He’d gone to one of the colleges in the area, and fell in love for the first time. Since it was the 1970’s, in a small town where word travels fast, he and his boyfriend had to be together in secret. After graduating, they drifted their separate ways, but he was out of the closet now. He, too, had tried searching with more traditional methods to no avail.
I never had any love for my small town. I’d moved to New York to get away from the insularity of it all. To finally be among those romantic faces that people see on the street and think that they could fall in love with—just maybe, if given the chance. To blend into the fabric of the place I spent my formative years sneaking off to at every chance, pretending it was mine. Maybe it was the first time in my life, but through the stories of people trying to find one another, I found a little bit of love inside myself for the place I left behind.
After my tumble down the missed connections rabbit hole, I came back to my New York reality to respond to beige messenger bag guy. But even upon resurfacing, I wasn’t sure what I was actually going to say. I thought about accepting his invitation for coffee or drinks. Why not give it a try? But every time, I never felt ready. I never felt sure. I kept considering that this person was just another stranger on the train. But then again, so was I. I lingered over the arrow to write back, and figured at the very least, it felt worth it to let him know I was there. So I hit reply. Re: Cute girl on the L train this evening…
Jamie Kahn is a Brooklyn-based writer and music journalist whose work has been featured in Huffington Post, The Los Angeles Review, Yes Poetry, Far Out Magazine, Capsule98, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, The Spotlong Review, Lover's Eye Press, The Hunger, and Oyster River Pages. She serves as the contributing features editor for Epiphany.
