The Stranger on the Train Read My Notebook and Cried
I was writing about my sister. She was reading over my shoulder.
I didn't know she was reading. The train was the 7:15 from the suburbs to the city, the one where you sit knee to knee with strangers and pretend they aren't there. I was writing about my sister, who had died the month before, and the words were coming so fast I wasn't thinking about who could see them.
I felt the woman shift beside me. I looked up and she was crying, quietly, the way you cry when you have learned not to make a sound. She was looking at my notebook. At the poem.
'I'm sorry,' she said, and she meant for reading it.
I should have closed the book. Instead I turned it so she could see the whole page. I don't know why. Maybe because the poem was about my sister and my sister was the kindest person I knew and she would have wanted the woman to read it.
She read it twice. She didn't say anything for a long time, and then she said 'my brother' and she didn't finish the sentence.
We didn't talk after that. She got off at the next stop and I watched her walk down the platform and I don't know her name and she doesn't know mine. But for three stations we were the same person, two people who had lost someone and were carrying the loss in a bag or a notebook or a heart that had to keep beating anyway.
I never finished the poem. I tried, for weeks, but the poem was finished the moment she read it. It had done what it was for. It had found the one person on the train who needed to know that someone else was writing about the same thing.
I write about my sister differently now. Not less, but differently. I know there is always someone reading over your shoulder, even when you think you are alone. Especially then.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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