Mina - "Piu di'Te"
Adriano Celentano - "Prisencolinensinainciusol"

I think a lot about this one time that Carlo and I got on the subway and he freaked out because he swore he'd glimpsed the train conductor eating a snack out of a bag that just said "HUMBO" on it. I was like, dude, either you misread the bag or it's a snack in another language, one with which we're not familiar. But when we stopped at a station with wifi he looked it up, and there was nothing online anywhere. A misreading, surely, still. But he persisted. "HUMBO IS REAL," he told me. Whatever.

When we stepped off the car, I thought he was behind me, but as I got on the escalator, I turned around and saw him standing next to the front of the train, trying to take a photo of the conductor's mystery snack. There was a pause when the train should have begun to move, but didn't. In that single beat I felt a complicated panic flush through me. What if this man could tell that Carlo was taking a picture of him? What if that was why he wasn't moving?

All day, I thought about this moment, blushing. Months later, I still think about it when the train makes the pictures in our apartment shudder against the wall. Your life is shot through with these kinds of small mysteries, questions to which you might never get an answer: why she left, what he meant, why that strange man took a photo of you through the train window while you were just eating your perfectly normal imaginary snack and trying to do your job. All these open questions just strung through the story of you, glowing their weird light, complicating things. Plus all the other people in the world, carrying around the answers you might never get, not even understanding the value of what they hold. Sometimes the world looks like a complicated piece of circuitry; beautiful and impossible, your understanding of its beauty disconnected from its function, what it actually means.