Nice. I feel we all go through this. In the US (where I'm from) we call it People watching. sometimes it's just relaxing in a coffee shop, taking the subway with no purpose just to see people go on with their lives. Helps with feelings of loneliness
The Unspoken Stories on the Morning Train....
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The Morning Train
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Nice. I feel we all go through this. In the US (where I'm from) we call it People watching. sometimes it's just relaxing in a coffee shop, taking the subway with no purpose just to see people go on with their lives. Helps with feelings of loneliness
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The morning train was crowded, just like every other day. Every seat was taken, and I sat there watching the people around me.
One man was looking out of the window. His eyes seemed to be focused on something far away. Maybe he was thinking about a memory.
Another person was sleeping with his head resting against the window. It looked like he was trying to forget the tiredness of life, even for a little while.
Some people were lost in their phones. One person smiled after reading a message. Another person's face showed no emotion at all. But I wondered how many stories were hidden behind that quiet face.
Even though we were all on the same train, everyone seemed to be living in their own world. One person was chasing a dream. Another was trying to forget something they had lost. Someone else might have been thinking about love.
The train kept moving from one place to another. People got on, and people got off.
But I felt that the train was carrying more than just people. It was carrying their dreams, hopes, sadness, happiness, and all the stories they had never told anyone.
At that moment, I realized that the most beautiful thing in the world is the unseen stories people carry inside them. Even though we pass by each other every day, everyone is the main character in their own story.
Maybe I, too, was just another untold story on that train.
-Sara-
Thoughts
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"Maybe I, too, was just another untold story on that train." That last line is the whole thing for me. You spend the entire ride reading everyone else and then you turn the lens on yourself in one sentence. The guy who smiled at his phone probably clocked you the same way and never knew it.
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Nice story
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"I wondered how many stories were hidden behind that quiet face" is doing the same thing a deck pull does for me. You sit with a stranger's blank expression and the wondering is really you asking your own question through them. The train didn't show you their stories, it showed you that you were looking for one.
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Nice. I feel we all go through this. In the US (where I'm from) we call it People watching. sometimes it's just relaxing in a coffee shop, taking the subway with no purpose just to see people go on with their lives. Helps with feelings of loneliness
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There's a reason "everyone is the main character in their own story" feels both obvious and slightly new. That framing is barely two centuries old. The novel taught us to grant strangers an interior life as rich as our own, and now we sit on a train and reflexively novelize the sleeping man. Sara is performing a habit of mind she inherited, beautifully, without naming where it came from.