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In celebration of the Trinity Collections 100th anniversary,
Cartier shares testaments of love in all its forms from around the world.
Please keep listening for today's love story later in this episode.
Love now and...
Did you fall in love?
That's the line of love.
Stronger than anything.
You should love for love.
And I love you more than anything.
You should love it, bro.
From The New York Times, I'm Anna Martin.
This is Modern Love.
Zo Fishman had a big crush.
She couldn't stop thinking about this cute guy she kept seeing on the train.
And she actually kept thinking about him for years.
She just had this feeling that they were meant to be together.
Here's Zo, reading her essay.
The Subway Crush, who crushed me.
We met on the subway on a Saturday morning nearly 14 years ago.
And our meeting had been a long time coming because he'd been my subway crush for about six years.
I'd met him once or twice at those early 20s apartment parties in New York.
The ones with open bags of tortilla chips on counters.
Cheap liquor and red solo cups.
And illicit activity happening in the bathroom or right on the coffee table.
He'd been dating my coworker Lana and then he wasn't dating her,
but he was still around just out of sight and out of reach.
And I liked him a lot.
His name was Ronan, but to me and my friends, he was known as That Is Really Guy.
And then months later, he was known as Subway Crush.
I would see him sometimes in the morning on the way to work at my stop in Carol Gardens in Brooklyn.
I would fidget on the other side of the concrete pole separating us
as the F train pulled up.
And then I would watch him when the crowds parted.
He was tall with black hair.
He had a beard and these big hands.
And on the subway, he listened to music. He read.
And I never saw him with another woman.
Then, roughly six years passed.
Sometimes months would go by and he would disappear.
Occasionally, I would ride the train with some other guy
and hope my Subway Crush would see me with him.
He never did.
I also never saw him in the neighborhood,
even though he clearly lived nearby.
When Ronan and I finally met that fateful Sunday, my voice was shaky.
He was with my old coworker, Lanna,
and a man who turned out to be her new husband.
Ronan had set them up.
Lanna came up to me and said hello, and Ronan followed.
I said, I see you on the subway all the time.
Way too loudly.
He said, I see you all the time.
And his smile brightened up his face like a light bulb.
I found myself squinting as it shone down on me.
And I smiled back.
A week later, we went on a date.
Six months later, I moved in.
One year later, we were engaged.
And a year after that, we were married.
And I couldn't believe I'd been right.
And that my intuition about Ronan had been so spot on.
And then the universe punched me right in my smug dumb face.
Eight years and two beautiful sons later,
Ronan left for work from our home indicator Georgia,
and never came back.
During the day, blood vessels suddenly ruptured in his brain,
and he fell into a coma that he never woke up from.
Then a week later, he died.
Inside that beautiful head, behind that megawatt smile,
had been a ticking time bomb.
It was an arteriovenous malformation,
which is a rare tangle of abnormal blood vessels prone to
damage. No one saw it coming.
I certainly hadn't.
The thought had never entered my mind.
The renen could be here one morning,
and be gone by that same afternoon.
The day of the funeral, it was near 100 degrees,
and the sun beat down on the heartbroken crowd.
Later, my father would say to me,
I've never seen a crowd like that.
It was like JFK's funeral or something,
and it was.
Friends and family had flown in from all over the world
to pay their respects, not quite believing that this kind of
tragedy could happen to Ronan.
He was the kind of man that gave sparks of life-affirming energy
to everything he did,
and there I was, holding the hand of our five-year-old,
with our two-year-old sucking a lollipop on my lap.
My sons kept saying,
Ima, Ima, Ima, which is the Hebrew word from mother,
where Nen was Abba and I was Ima.
That's how we worked.
I wondered what in the world had happened.
Never in a million years did I foresee this.
It had no resemblance to my childhood,
and I had nothing to compare it to.
How on earth was I going to be a single mother?
How could it be that their father was gone?
I knew time would keep going on.
We'd all hopefully age,
but Ronan would be 44 forever.
We'll be right back.
This podcast is supported by Cartier.
As far back as I can remember,
my mom and I have always had this double-hand squeeze.
Twice in a row means I love you.
She told me that it signifies like your heartbeat because it goes twice,
so every time she squeezes,
it just means that she loves me with all her heart.
I remember one time when I was seven, I had this really bad nightmare,
and so I clambered out of bed and I ran to my mom and dad's room,
and then I remember that my mom,
I don't know if she was fully awake or not,
but she must have realized that I'd come in
because she tapped me twice on my arm.
It makes me feel happy,
like really loved,
like no matter what I'm thinking at the time,
no matter what is happening around us,
I know that my mom loves me and she will always love me.
We love from Cartier.
I'm David Marquez.
And I'm Lulugar Sienovaro.
And we're the hosts of the interview from The New York Times.
David and I have spent our careers
interviewing some of the most interesting
and influential people in the world.
Which means we know when to ask tough questions
and when to just sit back and listen.
And now we've teamed up to have these conversations every week.
We'll try to reveal something about the people shaping our world.
And we'll get some great stories from them too.
It's the interview from The New York Times.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
It's been two and a half years,
and I look for him.
Is he that hawk circling overhead
or that butterfly flitting through the backyard?
I don't think he is.
I have a recurring dream where he's left me for another woman.
And I'm so angry I want to scream.
When I tell my friend Pam about it,
she suggests that maybe the dream is my subconscious,
trying to give me an explanation for his absence
that makes some kind of sense.
But why pile of pain on top of pain?
Couldn't I just see him in a white robe?
Couldn't he just give me one of his famous hugs?
I'd prefer that.
I noticed that I don't trust my intuition like I used to,
but time has pressed a sort of reset button on all of my senses.
And now I understand the difference between intuition and clairvoyance.
Trusting your gut and following your heart is intuition.
I'm no clairvoyant and never claimed to be.
So there is a difference.
Just because I failed to foresee a renun's death,
does not mean I can't listen to that inner voice in my head,
and that fluttering of recognition in my chest.
I may be heartbroken, but I would fall in love and marry renun all over again.
I would.
Once when we were dating,
Renad said something to me that I still hold deep in my heart.
We were people watching in South Beach,
when he turned to me and said,
sometimes I look at you and forget that you're my girlfriend.
And I think, God, she's so beautiful.
Like you're a stranger within I realize that you're not,
and I'm just so proud.
I'd never heard something more romantic.
It didn't matter if other men saw me that way or not.
It was that he did.
And the fact that he'd say that to me,
as still drums played and the sunset in the pink sky made my heart explode
into a million songbirds.
I see Renad and our boys are in love.
Are he seven and built exactly like renun?
He's tall and thin with yeti feet and impossibly long toes.
And his face is renun and so are his facial expressions.
He was too young when Renad died to imitate those expressions,
but yet here they are.
I see Renad's look of wonder,
his goofy grin and the way his smile lights up his brown eyes.
There he is.
And Lev, my four-year-old,
he resembles me more than Renan,
but it's the things he says.
Renan used to tell me to hug him harder.
Harder, harder, he would say, until I could barely breathe.
Lev says the same thing with the exact same inflection.
Our boys channel him.
They say things that knock the wind out of me.
Once I was sitting poolside, bare face and dripping,
and my friends' parents' house in Florida,
and Lev stood in the shallow and looked at me.
Really looked at me.
He said,
Ema, you look so beautiful.
Another time I was putting art at sleep,
and before I left the room, he said,
Ema, you're more beautiful than you think you are.
These are not the normal kinds of things I imagine little boys saying to their mother,
not with this kind of eerie, otherworldly conviction.
And I swear I haven't bribed them.
The only explanation I can come up with is Renan.
Speaking through them,
it's what he would say to me now if he could.
If he were here, like he should be.
Intuitively, absolutely.
I feel this in my bones.
I hear him in their voices.
Time has repelated a few seeds of optimism
in the new, forever altered, soil of me.
My heart can and should still be followed.
And I am grateful for the growth.
If you want to hear my conversation with SoFishman,
our last interview of the season,
you can check it out in the Modern Love podcast feed.
It's a really beautiful one.
Modern Love is produced by Julia Botero,
Christina Josa, and Riva Goldberg.
It's edited by Mark Pagan.
Our executive producer is Jen Poient.
This episode was mixed by Daniel Ramirez.
Our show is recorded by Maddie Mas yellow.
The Modern Love theme music is by Dan Powell,
original music by Dan Powell and Pat McCusker.
Digital production by Mahima Treblani and Nell Galoglie.
The Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones.
Meal Lee is the editor of Modern Love Projects.
I'm Anna Martin, thanks for listening.
