Found taped to a life insurance advertisement adjacent to the escalators of exit 1B, XXX Road Metro Station, 13 October, 20:32.
If you are the man, height 170-175 cm, full head of hair but some strands of gray, who takes the red line north and departs the subway via this exit every weekday evening at 7:30 p.m., give or take approximately 5 minutes, presuming you fulfill the above specifications, this letter is addressed & intended for you.
You may be wondering why I decided to compose this missive.
Firstly, and this may surprise you given our lack of direct communicative history, but I owe you an apology; while I ought to know your name & other facets of your identity such as age, occupation, marital status, etc., alas! I do not. And should you wonder why an anonymous letter-writer such as myself feels any obligation to know anything about your life, this brings me to:
Secondly, I first noticed you approx. 8 weeks ago. It was a mid-December, Thursday, and a constant drizzle had persisted for 4 days, perhaps 5, and such weather had taken an expected toll on my mood, which is to say I was glum, perhaps verging towards a clinically diagnosable species of depression and my colleagues, and also friends, told me over and over how I exuded a mood-killing funk out of every pore & orifice.
Something off in my expression, perhaps? Or in the cant of my shoulders? Anyhow one evening I was riding the subway home as normal and I saw a man in an amethyst coat and at first I simply admired the boldness of his sartorial choice (your sartorial choice), gawked at your willingness to ignore the unspoken regulations that trap the rest of us in grays and blacks and blues (gawking in admiration, to be clear). But then after my eye had been seized by the hue of your garment I noticed your face and really what I really noticed was that in the middle of an unremarkable subway car, pressed between office workers and young folk out for a night of fun and retirees whiling away their idleness, there you were, exuding a powerful, honest warmth. And as I continued examining your countenance I’m not sure how to put it exactly, but I felt less alone and less anonymous and also less hopeless about the world around me.
I don’t think you noticed me watching you.
I tried to be not-noticed, shuffled behind a big fat man watching videos at full volume on his phone. But I did watch you, not necessarily because I was enraptured by the curve of your eyebrow and dignity of your nose and the rich mingling of browns suffusing your irises but because you seemed like a brave person, brave and principled and willing to think for yourself, in other words a good person, and I couldn’t quite figure the precise reason for why I thought so, and so I kept watching until you disembarked. Then the next day, I made my same commute and saw a man who reminded me of the purple coat despite his navy jacket, and upon closer reflection I realized, same person, it was you.
Which is to say, thirdly, we’ve been taking the subway together for the past few weeks, you standing by the door, me a few meters away, running a complex series of mental computations in the hopes of deriving what about you is so genuine and decent.
And, finally, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve thought about committing to a course of action that will allow me to break free of the standardized routine of embarkation and silence and disembarkation, allow me to shift from not noticed to noticed.
Like maybe tripping and falling or spilling a bottle of water or saying, “hi”, at exceptional volume. Because you’ve brightened my world, Mr. Sometimes Wears a Purple Coat, and there’s something in your features that makes me think maybe we could resonate with each other maybe.
But every time I think about tripping or spilling or shouting, I tell myself I should be bold and have the courage to take a chance, but then I wonder about what-ifs and freeze, paralyzed by potential admonitions and denigrations, silences and snubs, and by the time I’ve once again persuaded myself to go for it, focus on the possible positives, the train’s passed XXX Road and you’ve disembarked and I tell myself I’ll be bold tomorrow. Then tomorrow I find myself once again paralyzed by potential disasters and embarrassments, and again the next tomorrow.
There were moments when I came so close to doing something, stepping out into the middle of the subway car and making eye contact and saying, “hi”, or, “hello”, something along those lines. But every time I’d look up and you were already stepping out of the carriage, already in the station, head down, practically racing to complete the final stage of your commute and return to non-subway life.
1 day, maybe 2 weeks ago, I wondered whether if I wrote down what I wanted to say, then maybe I would actually manage to say something.
So every day when I joined my coworkers in the elevator down from the office, I typed a sentence or two on my phone, things I could and should say, and some of it was unsayable, sentimental hokum and hogwash, but some felt… right. Not merely not-wrong, but genuinely right. And as I continued adding and tweaking and deleting sentences, I realised I need to one day pierce the fog of silence around us.
Yesterday I printed this letter and today I told myself once again that I will muster the courage to let you know I’m more than another background figure occupying the same urban spaces you move through.
But if trapped in the same loop of paralysis I’ve been trapped in the past dozens and dozens of weekday commutes, I will take this letter and put it somewhere you might see.
Realising that the pasting of these sentences and paragraphs, as unruly and harmless as they seem to me (at least until the point when I’m about to speak) goes against the constraints of my own reticence and goes against the regulations governing this city and the subway system. Realising that these sheets will possibly, probably, be taken down by a uniformed station worker almost immediately after posting and the worker will frown and sigh and wonder at the audacity of passengers who aren’t content to stay within the designated boundaries of acceptable commuting activities like purchasing tickets and standing in line and reading in silence, not speaking up, not making oneself noticeable, blending in among the masses.
Anyway…
Finally (and I do mean finally this time, really, I promise), this is my plan: take these words and take them up and hope. Hope that as you emerge aboveground, you’ll notice these sentences and paragraphs, that you’ll stop and read the first line and realize that I’m addressing you. Hope you’ll continue reading through my disorganised ramblings and arrive at these final clauses and syllables. That you’ll understand what I’m trying to say.
