I am in love with the girl on the train, and she has no name.
I can tell that she has been told she’s been better – and is in fact better – than the rest of us, that she’s special and loved and wanted. She’s been told she’ll do great things and people have preached her success and wealth. She probably has an obscure hobby she’s nurtured and grown and polished, and that obscure hobby will most definitely launch her into wild, unfettered success. Half the bumps in her Moschino bag are probably culturally-acclaimed novels she’s read and over-read dozens of times, with the worn corners and faded yellow felt-tip underlines. Her family was well-to-do but not so well-to-do that they had the leisure to spoil her, and her religion – existent or nonexistent – probably doesn’t give her the ease to rest easy with wool pulled over her eyes, from the pale worry lines in her forehead and the terse, devil-may-care attitude in her eyes. She was born with a beautiful face and beautiful hair, long fingers and tall calves, and her flaws – may she have any – are overwhelmingly overshadowed by the small shadow between her breasts, the sharp cut of her pointed jaw, and the way her body makes a perfect shadow on the train door with the rising blazing sun behind her. She’s going places, but she isn’t there yet, and so still held that dewy scent of fresh ignorance – beguiling – which frustrated her, yet compelled her, much in the same way that it washed over me and pulled me – urged me – to walk up to her and ask her name (but urges end in silence).
I can tell by the sleep in her eyes and coffee on hand that she is not the kind of person to get up early in the morning to prance around the neighborhood or pull her body into some yogi pose. She is the kind of person who would stay up till three in the morning squeezing the precious gems out a novel, desperately hog two hours of sleep – like some desperate fugitive on the run – and then wake up at five to finish the last three chapters, and then rush out the door on the double at seven, hair perfect, makeup flush. I can tell that she cares about her appearance, but not about how her appearance effects others; I’ve seen her in musty furs from some grandmother’s safe, a plunging top with dangerous straps, and high pin-heels with uncertain outcomes just as often as I’ve seen her in clinically tailored black slacks, a silky cream high-end blouse, and sensible pointed-toe ballet flats.
I enter the train two stops before her and I wait in my usual seat. Some days she is rushing, stumbling down the stairs, some days she is half-sleeping, weaving in the breeze, but some days she has a faint smile on her face, headphones in, coffee out, hair perfect, makeup perfect, looking like a dozen crisp roses on a sunny spring day. It’s funny because her stop is such an outback, so out-in-the-booneys and so out of touch that she blends just as easily as a peacock in a zebra’s den. I can only imagine the stares, the disbelief, the fingers, and the outrage her little Madden heels stir up as she marches down the unsteady concrete roads with the potholes and stubborn grass, old buildings and decaying, abandoned bicycles. But she does it anyway and that is why I love her.
I think that she is young (and I would be right) but not too young, just on the verge of tipping across the point of no return. Nineteen. That is a good and nice number, and it describes her perfectly. I think she is nineteen. No, it is more like I desperately yearn for her to be nineteen. She walks with her shoulders thrown back, music shoved firmly in her ears and fingers bare despite the wintry cold. She touches things with those fingers, be it the cold lifeless steel pole in the train, to the grain-like grass growing on the platform of her station; be it the velvet nap of the train seat or the wire of her earphones, rubbing them back and forth incessantly. When I see her she lives and breathes, touches, feels, exclaims, emotes, and creates. She has a hesitance about her though, because the world has told her to be closed and boxed and protected, and every time she cracks a secret smile or daydreams into a stranger’s conversation, I can see her chastising herself, pulling away. At nineteen, she is a late bloomer in the ways of the world, and that is also why I love her.
Yet some days I see her pushed down, pulled down, mulling near the ground with the rest of us; eyes cast down, knuckles white, hair straight. I feel as though I can see her life every day on those train rides, because she transmits her emotions so clearly and purely that they appear like beacons on her body and face, illuminating the hapless traveler to the ways of her world and the tribulations of her time. I’ve seen her cry once when no one was watching; I’ve seen her brow so furrowed and deep; I’ve seen her pissed off at the world and all its exasperating dictates, and I’ve seen her with her forehead to the glass, staring out the window with a face too ponderously serious for a day so beautiful. I am not privy to the life and times of this remarkable girl, but every day she opens a little door for the tourists to shimmy into for the pictures and snaps, and every day without fail I am part of that crowd, standing near the back, hands in my pockets, just basking in the little details I am allowed to partake of as she shines and glows and waves for the cameras.
I have lived my life alongside the girl in the train with no name, and her imaginary age, occupation, hobbies, and familial connections have given breath to my body like a devilish shot of espresso in the morning. One day I will cross the little aisle between our seats, stand in front of her, and tell her that indeed I too love that song which she has been leaking on repeat from her headphones. She will look up at me once in confusion – of course, she can’t hear me – but then she’ll take one ear out and give me a concerned little serious look and ask me what I want. She’ll be defensive at first, but after she finishes her first cup of coffee I know she’ll warm up to me. At first her ears will turn red, and then she’ll stutter something incomprehensible, but then I’ll easily coax a conversation out of her and we’ll talk, how we’ll talk; I’ll say that this is my stop as well, and she’ll believe me, because she isn’t the kind of person to notice that I’ve been sitting across from her nearly every morning for the past two months. I’ll invite her to coffee, she’ll remind me that she’s had it already, and I’ll charmingly quip that we’ll have to put a rain check on that, then. It’s a date, she’ll say, because despite how far above from the rest of us she is, she will perhaps have the grace to see something worth salvaging in me, and maybe that will be enough for her to fall in love with me as well.
There’s a girl in the train, and she yet has no name. But I am in love, in love, so desperately in love.
With the girl on the train who has no name.