You couldn't keep your eyes off of me -- w4m -- W 53rd (Midtown West)

You couldn’t keep your eyes off of me — w4m — W 53rd (Midtown West)

Note: We don’t usually do Craigslist posts here at the Awl, but when someone sent us the link to this Missed Connection we recognized its provenance and very quickly saved it in case it was taken down, which it almost immediately was. Here’s the whole thing.

You sat there for almost seven minutes, gazing at me in utter silence. I did not say a word either, but inside I was suddenly changed, made new, no longer the famous performance artist whose innovative works on the limitations of the body and the distance between performer and subject have proved so baffling and influential to three generations of spectators and critics but now something different, a complete creation borne out of your steely gaze, a child, longing for protection in the shelter of your arms, a young woman feeling the first flush of love, an ingenue, a flirtatious wisp of a thing whose coy charms mask her deep desire to find the impossible connection between two people whose souls are obviously so destined to be entwined that words are superfluous and the entire firmament of artistic endeavor under which one has made one’s entire career is irrevocably eradicated until all that remains is the pure animalistic desire which we suppress in ourselves in order to convince others of our humanity but which is never far below the surface no matter how placid-seeming the mask may be; your silence was a deep sharpened dagger moving slowly within me and the fire behind your eyes screamed forth its intention to consume me in its all-powerful flame until all that would be left of the two of us and every unnamed thing in this world would be a small pile of perfectly-formed ash and bone. This was last Tuesday, I know you remember it and felt it too. I also noticed that you had a terrific ass when you got up to leave. I’m done at MoMA but my new exhibit, “What Are You Looking At?” starts up at the Whitney in a couple of weeks. Please come by. We were made for each other.

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