In Transit

2026-09-25 · by AnyoneButSam

Grey hoodie. No.

Black t-shirt. I own seven of them. They're all the same t-shirt. At some point I decided that was a personality and not a problem.

The nice shirt, then. The one with buttons. I put it on and look in the mirror, and a man at a job interview looks back at me. Who is this for? The central station? The 14:32? The pigeons?

Take it off.

Black t-shirt, overshirt on top. That's a compromise. That's what grown-ups do.

But what if she's there. Nobody. The hypothetical she. The woman who only exists on trains in my head, who looks up from her book at exactly the right moment. What if today's the day and I'm dressed like I'm about to take the bins out.

What would she even see. I don't look good in clothes. I don't look good out of them either. Getting dressed is just choosing which version of not good I want to walk around in. Fabric arranged carefully over the parts I've spent twenty years arranging fabric over.

Shoes.

The white ones are clean. Too clean. Clean shoes say "I tried." The black ones are comfortable and dead, the soles worn down on one side from the way I walk, which says "I've given up, but in a relatable way."

I stand in the hallway holding one of each like a man deciding which wire to cut.

White ones. Fine. White ones.

Out the door, and immediately everything feels stiff. The overshirt sits on my shoulders like cardboard. The jeans are the good jeans, which means they're the tight jeans, which means I'm walking like someone with a secret.

And there it is. That feeling. I'm uncomfortable because I'm dressed up.

Which is insane when you think about it. We invented clothes to be comfortable. Warm, soft, protected from the weather. Then we invented nice clothes, which are uncomfortable on purpose, so other people can see that we suffered a little bit for them. Dressing up is a small, polite act of self-harm with a dress code.

The white shoes are already pinching.

A woman with a dog. A pug.

God. Look at it. Wheezing like a broken accordion, eyes pointing in two different directions, tongue out because there's no room left for it in its own face. We took a wolf, and over a few hundred years we bred it into a thing that can't breathe properly, and then we called it cute. It snores awake. That's not a dog. That's a warning.

She's talking to it in a baby voice. It's looking at me like it knows. Like it's asking me to tell someone.

A cat!

Orange, on a windowsill, sunbathing, completely unbothered, looking at the pug with open contempt. Now that's an animal. That's an animal with dignity.

I'd love two cats. Two, so they have each other while I'm out. A big lazy one and a small insane one. But the flat's too small, and I know exactly how it'd go. Litter box by the bathroom door. The whole place smelling faintly of cat piss forever. Guests sniffing the air and being too polite to say anything.

And don't get me started on the naked ones. The hairless ones. How can people call them cats? That's not a cat. That's a skinbag. That's a scrotum with opinions and a warm spot on your pillow. Disgusting.

The orange one closes its eyes at me. I choose to take that as respect.

Past the McDonald's, and it's teenager hour. Of course it is. Two high schools and a McDonald's within five hundred metres of each other. It's basically a nature reserve.

They're so loud. Every sentence at full volume, like they're all being paid by the decibel. Their faces aren't finished yet. It's like clay nobody's put in the oven. Features in roughly the right places but still deciding what they want to be.

And the boys. Oh, the boys. Half-hatched. Hoodies three sizes too big, sleeves over the hands. A moustache attempt that's really just a shadow with ambition. Voices that crack mid-word, going from bass to seagull and back. One of them is shoving another one into a bin for no reason, and they're both laughing like it's the funniest thing that's ever happened in the history of the world.

The girls standing with them look about three years ahead in every way that matters, and they know it. You can see it in the eye rolls. No wonder. If I was stuck with those boys, I'd roll my eyes too.

I was that boy once. Too loud. Wrong clothes. Convinced everyone was looking at me when nobody was.

Now I'm a grown man in white shoes, still convinced everyone is looking at me, when nobody is. Growth.

Hang on. That's the guy from the gym. The one who front squats like he's on a hydraulic lift. He's in a puffer jacket, buying a banana from the shop by the station.

A puffer jacket. And jeans.

It's wrong. It's so wrong. It's like seeing your teacher at the supermarket when you're nine and realising they buy toilet paper like everyone else. In my head he only exists in shorts, with a barbell on his chest. And here he is, peeling a banana, like a regular person with a mortgage and a mother.

And the woman from the leg press, with the forehead that doesn't move. In a long coat. Scrolling her phone at the bus stop. Normal. Human. I barely recognised her with her hair down and her face not straining.

They don't recognise me at all. Of course they don't. I'm furniture in their gym too.

Blip.

The gate beeps, the barrier swings, and I'm in.

Down the escalator onto the platform, and it's the whole city at once. Two guys in hi-vis covered in plaster dust, eating sandwiches out of foil. A cleaner at the end of a night shift, eyes half closed. A mum with twins in a double pram and the thousand-yard stare of someone who hasn't slept since the previous government. A grandmother in a long patterned dress with a shopping trolley bigger than she is. Polish builders arguing about something on one phone. A couple of pale old white pensioners in matching beige jackets, holding hands, looking at the timetable board like it personally betrayed them. Kids everywhere.

Everybody standing slightly too far apart. Everybody pretending the others aren't there.

And from somewhere, a video. Full volume. Some guy screaming about a supercar, a laugh track, a sound effect of a bomb going off.

Of course.

Headphones in. Immediately. This generation has some kind of allergy to headphones. A kid on the bench, fourteen maybe, watching videos on full speaker like the platform is his living room and the rest of us are his furniture.

I want to say it. Mate. Headphones. That's the whole invention. They exist. We solved this.

I've done it before. I've asked people to turn the sound off. And every single time, they turn it down. Just down. Like that's the problem. Like I was complaining about the volume.

It's not about the volume. It's about the fact that I can hear it at all. You're taking a space that belongs to all of us and painting over it with your stuff. Loud or quiet doesn't matter. It's a boundary problem, not a volume problem. And they genuinely don't understand the difference. They look at me like I've just asked them to stop breathing.

And then the other thought creeps in. The worse one.

Is this it? Is this how it starts? Is this me becoming the old man? The boomer who shouted at us for our music and our clothes and our phones? Am I the millennial now, standing on a platform, being upset about the youth?

Maybe. Probably. Every generation thinks the next one is ruining the world. And every generation is at least a little bit right.

I still think headphones are basic human decency. I'll die on this platform.

The train comes in, warm air and the smell of brakes. The doors hiss. I get on, find a spot by the door, and look down at my phone.

And the platform disappears. The train disappears. The people disappear.

It's funny. Almost everyone in this carriage is doing the same thing. Heads down. Faces lit blue. Thumbs moving. Forty people in a metal tube, and nobody is actually here. We're all somewhere else.

Somewhere else is everywhere now. That's the thing. The walls of the world are gone. You can see into every country, every war, every disaster, every angry stranger, all day, every day, in your pocket. The world has never been bigger, and it's never felt smaller. Or more worn out. Or more dangerous.

A flood somewhere I've never been. An election somewhere I'll never go. A stabbing three suburbs away. A war. Another war. A man explaining why everything's about to collapse. A woman explaining why it already has. A video of a dog saving a toddler. An ad for protein powder. Another war.

Statistically, the world has never been safer. It has never felt more like it's about to end. We get every emergency on earth delivered straight to our hands, one after another, faster than we can feel anything about them. So after a while, you don't. You just scroll.

My mind goes offline.

Thumb up. Thumb up. Thumb up.

Stations slide past outside the window. I don't see them. The kid with the speaker got off somewhere. I didn't notice. The white shoes are still pinching. I don't feel them.

Thumb up.

The doors open at the central station, and I step out onto the platform, and I couldn't tell you a single thing I just looked at.

Dark Fiction · Mature Themes · Unflinching