differences
My torn jeans are evidently noticeable, that they are ripped and rolled up and puffy and dirty, and that my shoes are clunky old running sneakers. The man beside me is wearing a black coat and black pants and is talking with a woman I can’t see about cell phones and people at work. He bounces now and again when he laughs, and he has a rough and slow Boston accent that he can’t hide (trying?) although he doesn’t say much. I don’t think he actually is listening to the woman. She is blathering and he punctuates pauses with a ‘yep’ that sounds deeply bored. I am bored by both of them.
My left arm, next to which this man is sitting, has rhythmic pains from a bike crash two days ago when I landed on the street, shoulder-first. There is a circle there growing with many shades of blue and green.
In this same crash I ripped my jeans at the knee, and I haven’t changed out of them since.
The man is gone now; he arose from his seat sluggish (I see him better now and he is older than I thought, with no hair) a few stops after the woman had left. In the two train stop interval during which I sat next to this man and he next to me and not saying anything (as his friends had left) I wondered the world he inhabits and his eyes that glanced at me, once — not knowing whether it was prompted by disdain or interest — and perhaps I was not bored by him; in fact I seem to have spent most of this time thinking about him, and even writing this, here, partly as he sat next to me. What could possibly be interesting here?
Sometimes everyone on the train moving under Boston seems nervous but holding it in; the train bumps and swerves and jostles us whose faces are calm but sway unsteadily, an eery unison, weakened of our individual power to control ourselves. Relative to an observer from the building we are nothing but the blur of the train; relative to a poor family in Bolivia we are all rich Americans; to the birds we are dots moving in patterns, at times getting in and out of bigger dots.
