A couple of months or maybe even years ago I found myself stuck on a train with two peculiar strangers. I had met none of them before. Both figures that had been imposed on me by by father fate that day were blank sheets and yet full of sustainable impressions as I would later see.
On our joint journey from A to B, my fellow travellers and me were mostly hiding our voyaging faces in phones, books and behind thoughts or closed eyelids in polite and appropriate silence, and only rarely a pair of eyes furtively wandered across the compartment to spy the land and catch a glance of the others in the room.
The discrete and subdued gestures reduced the scenery to such minute proportions that are typical for those kind of moments that we share with unknown people in confined space, those moments in which silence and constraints of space set the tone and create a human density that yields just the right ambience for serenity and contemplation.
The second class compartment contained six seats but only three of them were taken - with me being the lucky one to have an entire row to myself, my reserve and travel utensils. The two gentlemen opposite me were hardly what I would describe as noticeable or striking but neither were they unattractive or unpleasant.
The young man sitting opposite right to me in the direction of travel and next to the window looked fairly tall although lolling into the corner like an overly cool student parading his indifference and laxity in the class room. The fine lines around his eyes were clear proof of the fact that his schooldays were probably long gone but his attitude and posture still clung to more than just one complex of adolescence.
He seemed utterly absorbed by his frequently humming and vibrating mobile phone, and his two hands scurried nimbly over the miniature keyboard barely allowing themselves to pause in between. His slightly glassy and red eyes seemed glued to the happenings on his phone and barely showed a wince. Once or twice he looked up to catch my eye and a certain coquetry emerged from the so far anonymous ground between us. And while the train rattled obstinately along the track I couldn't help but wonder which kind of mobile conversation he was engaged in.
The person sitting next to him was an elderly man who had a bald head, which strangely contradicted the full and snow-white beard that adorned his wrinkly face. His moustache was interspersed with a couple of isolated dark brown hairs that seemed to be the only witness of his faded youth between the grey and white bristles. The man read a book and a pair of rimless glasses slipped down his nose whenever he turned a page. I didn't manage to make out the title of the book but I am sure it was rather amusing since every now and then a friendly and somehow familiar smile escaped his otherwise composed countenance.
I don't know why but for some reason old people have always made me sad. Even if they smile or probably because they do so. Whenever I face the graciousness and contentment of age, I turn into a sniveling sentimentalist who has just learned that life won't last forever.
And so I found myself torn between my attempts to philander with the man to my right and the compassion I unsolicitedly felt for the gentleman to my left when the train abruptly came to a stop in the middle of nowhere with no station in sight.
~ to be continued ~
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