Catch a train

I was sitting at a train station on the weekend, alone, waiting for some of the people I love the most in the world to arrive on the next train. It’s strange to think that people — talking, thinking, moving people — are in the tiny dot on the horizon. Not just my people but other people, too, and here? Here with me there is nothing but yellow train station lighting and, eventually, a man in a puffer coat bouncing on his toes, hands in pockets, glancing occasionally at the oversized clock.

I had wandered up to the bridge that crossed the tracks by this point, and the dot on the horizon was becoming a train. I balanced my phone in one of the fence post gaps and I decided to get a video of my people disembarking from the train. Public Service Announcement: You Never Know Who’s On Your Train.

First off the train is someone in a high viz work jacket, leaping from the carriage with an unmistakable motion towards something I hadn’t noticed: a scooter. Is it just the act of jumping on a scooter or is this person propelled, also, by the joy of a Friday night after work? Is it home, this person is going? To a partner or a parent or a child or a video game or to bed? Or is that scooter headed out somewhere? Is it hope that drives that little leap? Love? Expectation? The unknown?

A man in a porkpie hat and dark colours carries his work bag, sure, but what glints and shines beside it? It’s a shopping bag from a posh shop, all sharp corners and rope handles. Pink. Glossy. What’s in it? Who’s it for?

A woman carries a child, already pyjama-clad, ahead of the man who exits the carriage forwards while looking backwards. He’s carrying one of those short, wide cardboard boxes that market-bought cherries come in. Does it have cherries in it or something else? Why is he looking back? Did he drop some? Is he wondering if he had a bag? How many cherries are too many cherries? What’s he planning?

Inside the empty carriage, a sleeping woman wakes. In a moment she will discover she’s at the end of the line (literally, not metaphorically).

There is, further along the platform, a man with curly hair attempting to get through the door to the station while wearing a huge, bright red instrument of some kind (a guitar? A double bass? A Cello?).

There are long-term travellers and short-term passengers. There’s at least one argument and there are several people telling other people which way they’re supposed to be going. I count six colourful hats and one pair of braces and a party of people who, if I had to put money on it, I would guess were attending an event that is safari themed.

Off they go filing into the evening, all these people and many more, just as others wake from slumber on the other side of the planet. For some of them, just statistically speaking, it’s about to be the worst day of their lives. For some, it’s their birthday. One of them, maybe even one of them on this train, maybe even high-vis on the scooter or captain cherries or lady yellowpants, will find themselves, just hours from now, thinking, I haven’t had this much fun in ages. Maybe they’ll be dancing, moving, flying, feeling the music all around them, feeling loved or safe or lost or found. Maybe there are old friends. New friends? Someone they’ve snuck outside with, leaving the evening’s main events behind? Maybe not. For some people on the train, the night will be unremarkable.

The train was empty, by the way, when I looked around for my family and started to believe I had the wrong train.

I didn’t. They’d slipped off without my noticing and I found them standing out in the street wondering why I hadn’t been where I said I was. ‘I was looking at all the people’, I said to them. ‘Did you see the one with the cherries?’ one of them asked me.

Public Service Announcement: you never know who’s on your train. Or in your life. Or just adjacent to your life. Maybe you’ll meet someone carrying a box of cherries. Better still, why not be the one carrying the cherries? We’re stumbling into metaphor territory here and I don’t know what cherries are a metaphor in your life but: be the cherries you want to see in the world. Everyone deserves cherries.