It’s 8:14 am on the train, and I am sandwiched between a sleeping, middle aged woman with her head lolling in my direction, and a well-dressed business kid with shiny brown shoes, holding a phone connected to wireless earbuds. I’m nosy, and glance down at the screen he leans over as the train goes around a curve and we are all drawn forward. In iTunes, he scrolls through his songs, tapping, “He Was Alone,” rhythmically nodding his head to the music that swarms in to his earbuds from cyberspace.
A text message pops up on the screen in Spanish, and is instantly translated to English when he opens it up. He responds,”Get ready for a long day, my friend. We have that strategy meeting,” with a distraught emoji face at the end. He taps “Translate,” before sending to give the impression that he can both speak and write in Spanish. The emoji remains the same. He watches for a minute for those three dots, but no reply surfaces.
I feel a head on my shoulder and the woman next to me is closer than ever. I wonder if she missed her stop. Her long black hair hangs down in front of her eyes in a sleep that is far too deep for public transit.
I shift in my seat and look back over at business kid’s screen. iTunes is open again, and he turns off the song and closes the program, leaving the earbuds in. He opens up a notebook and begins to type rapidly with his thumbs.
“You did the right thing. Now you can move forward and be your own person. You are on your own now, and this is what you needed to do. You need to be alone right now.”
The train stops briefly and the woman next to me lifts her head as if an internal alarm went off. She arises from her coma and walks in a slant towards the door, and out of the train.
Next to me business kid is still typing a message to himself, but I don’t read over his shoulder anymore. He wants to be alone, I get that. I wonder if he will read what he wrote back to himself later, or just needed to get something off of his chest and there was nobody to listen? God, do we all feel that way?
An animatronic voice announces, “This, is Clinton.”
I exit the train, fully aware that the narcoleptic woman who had been next to me was quicker on the draw at her stop than I was. Standing on the platform I watch the train pull away, suddenly aware that there are individual humans inside of it. Feeling slightly less alone, because of a stranger’s loneliness.

Luciana, 29