Before You Knew My Name (4)

Life, she understands in this moment, has stopped happening to her. She has stood in the middle of too many summers and winters, too many dance floors and other people’s parties, and simply woken up the next day older than before. For so long, nothing has changed. She has been on pause, while the man she loves goes about making his life. Offering the tiniest of spaces for her to fit into, asking her to make herself small, so he can keep her right here. Alone.

Alone, here.

She doesn’t want to be here anymore.

The plan is not entirely clear as dawn approaches, waves and rain and tears saturating everything around her. Ruby won’t even really understand, some days later, as she scrapes together her life savings, books her one-way ticket from Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport to JFK, just what she’s doing, or why. She only knows that she cannot stay here any longer. That she needs, desperately, for something, anything to happen to shake her out of her current state, and New York seems as right a place as any for reinvention.

In this way, our worlds are spinning closer every second.



I have an image of her on the plane, coming closer. The way she keeps reaching back toward Australia, folding time in on itself, so that Ruby is both 35,000 feet above her old life and stuck smack in the middle of it. I see her memories playing like an old mixtape, a best-of compilation she has heard many times, but up there in the air even the smallest moments seem tinged with tragedy. The way he looked at her when … the first time they … the last time she … and now she’s pushing her forefinger hard against the small airplane window, blinking back tears. She watches her nail turn white; tiny, perfect icicles forming on the other side of the thick glass. Around her, people have already reclined their seats and started to snore, but I know that Ruby is wide awake for the entire flight, just like I am wide awake that whole bus journey from Wisconsin, this whole same day we make our way to New York City.

And, just like me, Ruby Jones cannot help but spend the journey returning over and over to the lover she left behind. The proof of him. For me it is a stolen camera. For her it is the last message he sent, right before she boarded the plane.

I missed you. Past tense.

I missed you.

As if there are already years, not hours, between them.



We arrive within minutes of each other.

‘Where to? WHERE to, lady?’

The cab driver at the bustling JFK taxi rank speaks louder this second time, half-shouts at Ruby, and she blinks away the vastness of his question, the heart-stopping open space of it. He just wants an address. She has an address—she can give him an address, if her sleep-deprived mind will just remember the details.

‘I … uh …’

Ruby reads a street name and building number from her phone, offers it more like a question. The driver huffs his acknowledgement and pulls out into the snaking line of traffic exiting the airport. It’s getting dark, there is a grey tinge to the air, something glassy over her eyes. She tries to shake off the lethargy of more than thirty hours of travel, tries to find some small, preserved part of herself that is excited to be here. She felt it, briefly, when she landed at LAX. A little arms-out-wide moment at all the freedom ahead of her. But that was hours ago, hours of transit and bad coffee, before another flight jolted her three hours ahead, so that she’s missed the sun twice over, and has no idea what time it’s really meant to be.

As Ruby looks out the cab window at her new surroundings blurring by, she thinks maybe that first view of New York’s famous skyline will cheer her up. An iconic bridge she will recognise, or one of those familiar buildings, lit like a Christmas tree. For now, it’s grey plastic bags floating like bloated birds in the trees, and a freeway knocking up against the sloping yards of thin, slate houses; if she can just keep her eyes open, just hold on, she knows these houses and church billboards and chain link fences will soon give way to shimmering water, to neon lights, and those famous metal buildings, narrow as fingers, beckoning. And, with this last thought, Ruby acknowledges she is delirious. Seeing bloated birds and beckoning fingers—she must be dreaming more than awake right now.

(I am stepping over cracks, shimmying around people, waving at my street signs and statues, as she presses her forehead against the glass of her passenger-side window, watching for those beckoning fingers. At what point in this journey do our paths begin to cross?)

Struggling to keep her eyes open, Ruby wills the driver to go faster. She wonders if he knows what an important role he is playing in her life right now, delivering her to a new world, a beginning of things, like this. As the driver talks to someone on his mobile phone, his voice so low as to be indecipherable, she acknowledges this man could not care less about her, or the way her heart has seemingly moved up into her throat. It is clearly nothing new for him, this transporting of another lost, hopeful soul to whatever awaits them in New York City.

She watches his hands slide across the steering wheel, each turn like a clock counting down and understands it is of no consequence to a stranger that she has come here with no plan, no calendar of events. He just wants to get her to her destination, drop her off and get back to whoever he’s talking to, maybe show up at someone’s door himself. Ruby is a task to complete, irrelevant to him and to New York, that neon glow outside her window, getting brighter. She suddenly feels like laughing.

I could, she muses, change my name, make up a life. That’s how anonymous I am right now.