She saw it in a train station.
A man on a bench, not young, with the particular exhaustion of a person at the end of a difficult thing — she couldn't have said what thing, only that the exhaustion was the specific kind that sits in the eyes and doesn't shift when you look away.
She was in a hurry. She had a train to catch. She didn't know him.
She sat down beside him.
She didn't know why. She couldn't have explained it in the moment and couldn't explain it afterward. She just sat down.
She said: are you alright?
He looked at her. Not with suspicion — with something more like recognition. As if being asked had reminded him of something he'd almost forgotten.
He said: not really.
She said: me neither, to be honest.
They sat on the bench for ten minutes. She missed her train. They talked about things — not deeply, not the way you talk to people you know, but the way you talk to strangers at the end of things, which is sometimes strangely honest. He was visiting a hospital. She'd had a difficult week. They didn't exchange names.
She got the next train.
She thought about his face for months. The specific tiredness of it. The specific look when she'd sat down, that thing that had looked like recognition.
She thought: I knew something about that face. Not because I knew him. Because I'd seen it in the mirror on my own difficult days.
We are not as separate as we move through the world pretending to be.
The face of the stranger is the face of someone you already know.
