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No. 007

I’m writing this from a train. A return ticket less than twenty-four hours apart.

I think I may have ended up with the worst seat on the train. The one where you sit directly opposite a stranger and feel the tremendous discomfort of not being able to move your feet a single millimetre further without bothering the person in front of you.

Ten minutes in, we seem to have reached an unspoken agreement on the territorial boundaries between us.

The journey is getting better.

I’m on my way to visit two friends I’ve neglected for longer than I’d like to admit, so it was either this express trip or letting the chance to see them pass me by—and with it, the chance to start making up for my absence.

Time passes much faster than I’d like. At some point, I think I needed so much space that, without quite realising it, I created distance from everything—and everyone. Lately, I’ve felt the need to look back, make amends, and see more clearly who has been there all along.

You can be surrounded by people, but who holds you while you cry in the most devastating way? Who cleans the wound on your back—the one strategically placed in that damn, impossibly unreachable spot? Who insists and shows up—unannounced and uninvited—to get you out of the house simply because they know you need it, even when you’re incapable of asking for help?

And yet, at some point, even the people who know us best were strangers too.

Every day, we cross paths with thousands of people. We notice some of them, but very few ever become truly known to us. Those invisible lives that exist all around us. The people we pass while walking. The woman sitting opposite us on the train. The man who is always at the same table in the café. Someone crying while talking on the phone. Two strangers laughing. A couple sitting on “your” bench…

We see only a few seconds of their lives. And yet, behind each of them is an entire universe we will probably never have access to.

So, when did we become close? When did we decide to cross that invisible line and get to know each other? How did it happen? How many coincidences had to occur for us to ever meet?

I think of the six improbable coincidences that had to happen for Tomáš and Tereza to meet in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Being at that exact restaurant at the same time. A book. Beethoven. The number six. Timing. A yellow bench. Ordinary, random things that, at any other moment, would have meant nothing on their own, but somehow, at that precise moment, made Tereza notice Tomáš.

“Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities—or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences.”
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Among all the ordinary, random events of a day, certain details begin to form a composition. Chance begins to feel like meaning.

Perhaps it begins there: among the hundreds of people who pass through our lives, one of them stops being part of the background and stays long enough for us to become visible to one another. It is somewhere in that becoming visible that intimacy begins—when we stop imagining each other’s worlds and begin to see them from within.

And that is where the miracle lies. Among this sea of invisible lives, two find one another, becoming close enough to share (in) time.