I had a lot of trouble relaxing on the Amtrak home to New York on the last Saturday of September. I was wearing low-rise flare jeans from a Depop in Kentucky. They are great jeans for standing and for sitting very upright, which was the last thing I wanted to do. Unbuttoning them was not an option; it would make me feel like I was getting fat and being impolite. So I sucked it up and in since the train ride was only going to be a few hours.
I got tired of scrolling on Instagram, seeing all the posts of people I know at the football game. They all posted slightly different versions of “yay school spirit” and “we love college.” I had to leave the game early to make my train, and I missed Brown’s first win against Harvard in 14 years—at least, I think it was 14. I don’t really care about football.
It was a cloudy afternoon, and Connecticut was looking especially unimpressive. I had Fiona Apple and Lana Del Rey blasting in my AirPods because I decided, for no reason, that I wanted to be melancholy and contemplative today. I kept telling myself to look at the houses next to the train tracks and imagine the people who live in them, but my eyes kept focusing on the dirt residue on the plexiglass windows instead.
About an hour in, a man in his sixties sat next to me. He arrived with another man in his sixties, his friend, and they both sported worn-out flannel shirts. But the one sitting beside me wasn’t wearing a bucket hat.
I was in no mood for a stranger to sit next to me. I had already decided that I wanted to be melancholy and contemplative, and a stranger sitting next to me would most definitely impede on this plan of mine. But the train was crowded. And he seemed nice enough.
I started to wonder if the man next to me knew I came straight from the white-out-themed Harvard vs. Brown football game, and that’s why I was wearing a white tank top and blue jeans. He definitely didn’t. But I like to make up stories about people in my head.
I decided that he probably wouldn’t have liked that I left a little before halftime. And if he asked why I did that, I would have to explain that I was getting overstimulated by all the people, that my phone had no service, that the humidity and wind were turning my freshly blown-out hair crunchy, that someone who was stressing me out was most definitely nearby, and that leaving the game early with my friend was really the most logical option.
I put on a different, more upbeat playlist and reminded myself of how bizarre it was to create such a false narrative. If I said all this to him, his reply would probably be nice enough. But maybe he would secretly judge me and think I’m superficial and lack school spirit—because that’s probably how my story sounds.
Anyway, none of this happened. And I had just wasted twenty minutes of my precious youth making up a self-indulgent narrative about what a stranger thinks of me that benefited me in no real way at all. All he’d seen me do was shuffle some songs on Spotify, fix my lip-liner in a tiny rose-gold hand-held mirror, and eat vegan butter-flavored popcorn. He probably hadn’t thought about me at all. I yelled at myself in my head to stop acting like a weirdo in ten different ways. I just wanted to snap out of it. Was this social anxiety, or was I just an egomaniac? Maybe I shouldn’t have had a Black Cherry White Claw for breakfast.
He fell asleep for a good portion of the train ride, and I was happy about that because the reflective but reductive attitude I adopted was growing rather self-conscious and negative. If he was asleep, he couldn’t perceive me anymore.
I felt bad when I had to wake the stranger up to use the bathroom. He wasn’t asleep asleep. It was more of an “I’m just resting my eyes” asleep. He got up quickly and I walked down the train aisle even quicker.
When I looked at myself in the mirror of the tiny bathroom that smelled like piss and pine-scented cleaning products, I thought about how my hair still looked crunchy, how I paid too much for a ticket on this shithole, and how I used too much brain capacity to imagine all the ways that a stranger would disapprove of me. I didn’t even have one thought about his life, I realized. I didn’t think about who he was, where he was coming from, or where he was going. I didn’t think about why he kept checking an interactive weather map on his phone. Nothing. He was busy being his own person while I was busy preparing for his judgment. I was literally just projecting because I was insecure. I didn’t really know about what, either. And if you had asked me at that moment, I probably would have said, “Everything. And my hair looks horrible.” It was probably something deeper than my hair looking crunchy from hairspray. But can I even call it projecting if I didn’t say a single word out loud?
When I got back to my seat, the man was back to looking at interactive maps on his phone. I have a bad habit of staring at other people’s phone screens, and he noticed me looking.
“I’m tracking my boat,” he said.
But “American Whore” by Lana Del Rey was playing a little too loud for me to understand. In milliseconds, I felt anxiety wash over my body. I had just constructed a fake interaction with this man, and now I was about to have a real one. I took out my AirPods quickly.
“Sorry, what did you say?”
“I said, I’m tracking my boat. On my phone. It’s amazing what phones can do now, right?”
“Yeah. It is really amazing.”
We chatted for about 20 minutes about his boat going from Connecticut to New Jersey, about his New Jersey upbringing, and about his favorite restaurant that was also in New Jersey. He was nice. He did not have a Jersey accent—in fact he sounded like he was from California. He loved that I asked about the name of his boat. Her name was Ophelia.
“She’s not named after anyone or anything like that. I just love that name.”
I liked that name, too. I like that boats always have girls’ names. I told him that if I had a boat, I would name her Athena or Aphrodite. I don’t know if I still agree with that. I feel like it’s really corny now. He said those names were beautiful.
When it was time for me to get off the train, he helped me get my suitcase down from above the seats and told me to have fun at my mom’s art opening. He had asked what I was doing while I was in New York for the weekend. The real reason was that I needed more Adderall (I am prescribed, but still—), and I didn’t want to tell him all that. And anyway, I really was heading straight to the gallery where she was showing her work.
As I walked my turquoise suitcase with one broken wheel down twenty Manhattan blocks, I didn’t put my AirPods back in. I looked at all the people I passed. I didn’t know anything about any of them. And they didn’t know anything about me. And that felt good.
Sole Magazine