Public Transportation

Assimilating loneliness and merging people

Photo by Mauricio Artieda on Unsplash.

I sit on the train. Not now. But once. A train sailing along the arc of Saturn’s rings from City to spore. I adjust my glasses. Some days I hate the way they sit on my face, slide down my nose. Some days I hate my glasses when they sit right. Makes me think I’m no good at stability. Even when things are good—

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I cry on public transportation. Not as a rule, you know. But. I do. Cry. It gets at me. Being surrounded by people sleeping in blue vinyl seats, people watching windows, fighting to decide between half-reflections and the world outside. They read important journals and papers, The Times maybe, while they listen to sonatas and lower their visors. They ride with eyes wide open. Garage doors closed. Tiny vents open to the past.

On buses, trains, and subway systems they go somewhere else, memory wormholes that appear then vanish in caverns, leaving behind wives and boyfriends. If they thought someone cared enough to watch, they wouldn’t go. But I’m watching and going, writing their stories with weary red eyes and solemn occupation. I know.

They let themselves remember. All the moments that got away. They reach back to fish them out and work to keep them from disappearing forever. Write them with fog like white crayon on white paper. They check to make sure the light from their setting sun has not yet disappeared off the water. On the buses and trains. They come here to remember the lovers they killed with words. The resentments they wished to undo. The battles they’ve lost with skeleton armies. No one is present. Every last one of them is gone. My compassion is the left hand of God reaching for Adam. I guess you could say I cry for them.

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This morning brought somnolent hues of blue. I went to my downstairs office and listened to the sound of a wasp fallen from the windowsill. He must have been cold in the downdraft of early morning.

I watched him wheedle his way over a series of cords until he was six legs in front of me. Then I gave him a talk about loneliness, said: you’ll find it everywhere, in houses, on flowers, and aboard trains. Loneliness has nothing to do with separation from the world. Loneliness is separation from self.

Then I read A Requiem for Loneliness and transported to Kuala Lumpur, pin cushion with needle buildings, sink filled with the wash-away food of last night’s supper, an eight course meal of corruption, vagrancy, destitution, disease, and homelessness. Drug use and illness. Classism.

I was taken to her world of anxieties. Her perspective with visor-up vision. Her train as it descended Saturn’s rings then transited the City and spore, which exist in my world. Her phantom refugees became louse-people, loneliness burned off like fog, and I was left with a stand of cobalt mountains.

The beam and truss of imagination build new architecture, and the bridges have brought me to Malaysia. I step cautiously, and love myself a bit more, even know myself a bit more, which is the cure to loneliness.

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The sky is blanched by free radical light. Now I breathe easy and feel less displaced among the business suits. I adjust my earbud, mute my music and slide my feet beneath the seat in front of me. I open my knapsack and withdraw a book, crack it open, then fade.

I pretend to read, but I’m waiting for people to love. They descend into their grottoes carrying canes and umbrellas to guard against cave water. I’m waiting in case they need me. It’s good. They wouldn’t venture inside if they knew. But I am. Watching. Just in case.

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Hey, I’m Roman. I’m working on my debut novel, 20xx, a work in magical realism. I write on Substack.