Why Do You Keep Waiting for the Next Train?

The issue was starting to get really challenging.

Every blessed morning the subway doors would slide open and he was sitting there.

Always in the same car, more or less the same seat. Earbuds and a book on his knees.

He had never looked at her once. Maybe never even seen her. And this gave her a sense of loss, of posthumous grief, of a circle that never closes.

How many attempts in front of the mirror…. Months of rehearsals, simulations, and hairstyles, but when the sliding doors opened in the morning, even the best Stanislavski would evaporate in the heavy air of the car.

Nothing. Not even a word came out. Not one step toward that indifference sitting there, concentrated on reading.

She began to believe that her block stemmed from powerful sexual attraction. She tried to monitor and temper it with forced abstinence.

Nothing. Not even that worked.

Maybe the new year would bring new wisdom and initiative.

It was time for suicidal resolutions, the kind that change your life if you follow through. So this morning she goes for it. She commits herself and above all promises herself that if she doesn't act now, she never will. She'll change her schedule, train, job, city, country, but she can't live anymore with regret for something not yet capable of generating regrets.

The doors will slide open and she'll approach him and say anything, or maybe one of those phrases she's studied for months at her desk, or simply sit next to him, if she finds a seat, otherwise, she will remain standing, and start telling him about her life these past months lived as a function of him who had never seen her before that moment. Or maybe that hard-won proximity would be enough to satisfy her, without going further.

It wasn't about attraction anymore, sexual or passionate. It was an obsession, and if she didn't extinguish it this morning, she would have its fire inside forever.

So the doors open, and in the car there's everything, the entire human sampling of the new year, but no trace of him.

She found herself in the seat she usually occupied, staring at the teenager opposite who was watching something Marvel world, earbuds in place.

When the train jolted and she realized she was heading back from the terminus, she smiled at him, as if apologizing for that invasion of space. But it was too late: the teenager had changed gender and was taking selfies against the background of the gray tunnel wall.

The girl moved her vacant gaze to her for a second, flipped her off, then returned to her favorite filter.

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