Transit
A clot of chai tea powder entered his mouth and dissolved against his teeth. He was sitting at the window, half-thinking about the abstract mess of people he saw through the coffee shop’s glass wall. He thought about the voyeuristic appeal of his present seat, and how he had come in and paid money to engage in this fantasy of seeing and not being seen. Then he thought himself strange for thinking that. After a few further cycles of self-reflection his perception had reduced to the level of sensation: his thoughts were going no direction in particular. At some point he stood up, paid, and left.
Standing in a busy train carriage he absently checked his phone, flicking his thumb up on the lock screen with the vague hope of seeing something new. The only correspondence that appeared was of the unsolicited corporate kind. He pocketed his phone and looked around. The person his jacket brushed up against on his left was composing a message in a language he did not understand. The emojis she used he thought conveyed a strange mix of self-debasement and excitement. He wondered who she was texting. After she sent her text she automatically moved her thumb to open her front-facing camera, and as his face filled the corner of her screen he jerked his gaze away and focused intently on the reticular station map above the window, to no avail.
She cleared her throat. “Excuse me.”
He reluctantly looked over. She was his age, slightly shorter, in a black pantsuit with a lanyard draped around her neck. “Don’t you know it’s rude to stare?” she inquired, in a tone that blew past patronising and fell just short of overtly hostile. His face in this moment resembled the expression you would find on somebody still sitting on a chair that had been pulled out from under him. In his mind her transgression of chewing him out over something widely considered tacitly acceptable so dwarfed his relatively minor faux pas that all he could express was a kind of stunned outrage. “Hello?” she repeated.
At this point his indignation swelled to such lengths that he could no longer take it seriously. He laughed in spite of himself. “Who are you texting?” he asked, refuting her interrogative stare with a muted smile. She paused, and they stood as commuters flowed around them like rocks in the path of rapids.
“My aunt,” she said eventually. “She’s visiting my mum for the first time since she moved here and it’s somehow become my job to be her tour guide.” He mentioned his interpretation of the emojis she had used. She laughed, and they both felt some subtle tension dissolve. “Is this a hobby of yours? Glaring at people’s phones and making up things about them?” He rolled his eyes and offered his assent. Their conversation continued for the remainder of their respective commutes. Before she disembarked she scrawled something onto a piece of scrap paper and squeezed it into his hand, running her fingertips across his knuckles as she drew her hand away.
Minutes later he stepped through the unassuming foyer of the building he worked in and into the elevator. As he reached down to press the worn number of his floor his hand brushed against the hand of a stranger doing the same. He looked over at the stranger, who offered a gentle smile he returned in kind. They stood still as they ascended, a comfortable silence between them, both looking straight ahead at nothing in particular.