1.

A woman two rows down across. She’s chewing a straw. I wonder if it’s the proprioceptive pressure that draws her to this little gesture. It makes me gag, triggered by memories of the same habit in childhood (and the accidental slip from the firm clamp of my teeth to near swallowing) and thoughts of the dirt form this metro that probably permeates her hands, that straw.

She absent-mindedly rocks an empty stroller as the straw dances between her gums. A child wanders from the grasp of the man next to her and crawls into her arms. She holds him tightly and he hugs her arm as the car jerks and sways.

2.

He is directly across from me, a slight hindrance in my study as on occasion our eyes meet. Eye contact is not proper etiquette in this gentle social intrusion of mindless transport. He is simple: jeans, polo shirt, sneakers. There is no evidence of his ethnicity other than those etched upon his face, around his eyes. He frowns but I do not think this is his common disposition. A scar upon his upper lip. Did he trip and bite through the thin pink flesh as a child? Try to shave his mustache drunk? Barely survive an epic knife battle?

It is his hands I can watch silently with less worry of an awkward stagnant gaze. Soft and strong, veins fighting to reach the surface as time slowly wears down the leathery barrier into a paper thinness, fragile as a flightless bird. Nails long but clean. Hands folded, then unclasped, then folded again, a soft impatient weaving of the air.

3.

In the corner nearest the door, she clutches a blue flowered jersey bag. I think she loves pastel colors. Powdery shading pervades her acceptable accessories: ipod case, crocks. She’s closing her eyes now and swaying her head softly. Perhaps it’s the motion of the train, or the exhaustion of this city life, or maybe there is something in that music to compel her to remove the rest of us from her vision. Her face is delicate in it’s serenity, a contrast to her slight thickness. Big boned, ill-fitting clothes or maybe modest obesity this body contrasts her hands too – small, delicate and tenderly holding a baby blue bag.

4. She sits directly in front of me and reminds me how this place makes me want to be black. I think the most beautiful women I have seen on the RER have all been black. The woman before me now is not striking in the manner of her likewise melanin rich sisters to which I refer. She is carefully plain. The course dark hair (so foreign to me that, were it not an alarming social taboo, I would ask to touch it) is carefully tamed back, perhaps glued there after a fierce struggle. Her eyebrows are perfect, thin, almost drawn. Make-up gently and flatteringly applied. A posture of politeness. She is perhaps a perfectionist. She fits no stereotype I know, to this I am not accustom.