Reflections

No one makes eye contact in the subway; no one makes any movement until they reach their stop, sometimes I wonder if subways were made for transportation or to be a monument to how little people care about each other. My stop is second to last so I get to see first-hand how bad it is. I usually stay on my phone or laptop to do the same as others do, maintain that look of no sympathy for others and in all honesty I really don’t care for these people.

The other parts of my life are dull; I get up, get on the train, get off and go to work, get back on the train, go home and go to bed then put it in repeat, it was like this for several months…..until one night while riding back home I noticed someone, it was only a reflection but the person in it was holding a knife and tossing it around but when I looked at where the person was they were just sitting there doing nothing, but his reflection still had the knife. I looked around to see if anyone else noticed but I caught several more reflections; a woman crying, a man putting a rope around his neck, another woman being hit several times, but none of them were actually doing these things.

At first I had no idea what to think of all of this, but the more I thought, the more I started to pass it off as being tired from a long day at work. Again I got up, got on the subway and waited for my stop. I thought about what I had seen or rather imagined last night, what state of mind I must have been in for that, I got off the train, went to my boring job, then back on the subway and waited again. Just out of curiosity I looked at the other people’s reflections, they seemed like regular mirror images, seeing things back to normal I went to sleep.

I was jolted up by a scream, I looked at everyone but they were still seated but I saw in the reflection of a woman as she was being beaten by a man and I saw even further that the reflection wasn’t even in the train, it was in a bedroom and judging by the pictures on the dresser it was the woman’s bedroom, I saw another reflection of a man on the train him sitting with what looked like his wife as she was crying, maybe a break up or something similarly emotional. This defiantly isn’t me being tired I still wide awake. I got off at my stop and tried to put it all behind but still unsure of tomorrow.

Woke up, boarded the train, work, then back on the train; I knew what was going to happen now and just as I thought the reflections happened again, people reliving their mostly terrible lives. Then I thought to myself “have I looked at my own reflection?” I slowly turned my head and stared straight across, I saw myself not to my surprise, but there was something about me that was different from every other reflection, it was different from everybody else, I stared into my eyes and for what felt like the first time I made eye contact with a real person.