– Commuter’s Literature

Brussels, but anywhere, I guess…

Morning’s seating strategy

Positioning oneself strategically is of key importance when travelling with public transport. My tactic begins at the stop. It calls for commitment. As I want to sit at the front of the tram, while I wait at the stop I take the first free seat from the top, so that I will be closer to the door I’m interested in. Sometimes, if there is already someone occupying the top-seat and all the others are empty, I have to make do with the 3^rd or 4^th one, as I don’t want my fellow commuter to think that I’m getting oddly close. Once on the tram I am very lucky if I find a free seat right away; still, I disregard the ones too far back, as a few seconds will make the difference between my catching and losing my coincidence, getting down one tram and onto the next one. The drivers couldn’t care less if you make your coincidence or not and never wait a second longer to allow passengers to move from one tram to the other. The painful irony is that the slogan of the company is “Our work is to bring you to work”. I swear that often a frustrated driver will do his utmost to be slow enough to allow the tram in front to leave. And he KNOWS the next one won’t be there for another 20 minutes, during the summer schedules. As if no-one worked during the summer? I realise that they have to demonstrate some form of power in their otherwise plain lives. Other conductors are lovely, it must be said, but a few I could seriously smack! I did kindly take up the subject with a couple of them, but they can be seriously mean, so I end up kind of shaking all over and it’s a bad feeling… a wasted bad feeling, as it doesn’t help me get anywhere – literally. In any case, if the coincidence arrives at the back of my 1^st tram, then boarding in a hurry is not an issue anymore. So: the important seats are a handful. I need to stand as close as possible to the first two parallel rows: four seats on the right – two by two, opposite each other – and two at the left – one by one, also opposite each other. The left ones are my favourites, especially the one facing the tram’s direction. Well, this isn’t accurately true: the one seat I really covet is the lone one, first on the left when coming through the door. Here I face forward for the whole first tract of my journey, before changing to the second tram, where a few good seats are always free. No-one sitting in front of me, no worries of awkward movements, knees or feet touching, eyes meeting… I can just get into my book and enjoy, undisturbed. But e.v.e.r.y.o.n.e. wants THAT seat…! 99% of the times it’s taken. I’d be lucky enough to get it, say, 10, 15 times a year. So normally I stand between the two rows of six seats that I can reasonably aspire to, open my book and start reading (in all of this there is the taking glasses on and off when reading in the winter, as the lenses get cloudy inside, picking up something that falls from the purse when I get the book out, stuff that happens to us goofy people, you know… I’ll spare you the details). No matter how taken I am by the story, a part of my brain is always intent on noticing the teeniest indication of someone getting up. A man raises his head and looks right, then left, to check if he has reached his destination. A woman pulls up the purse from her lap and holds it vertically by the handles. A girl closes her book. An old man or woman asks the neighbour to confirm if the next stop is Cavell rather than Gossart, … – all of the neighbours look at each other nodding and smiling. Students put away their notebooks. People who left a big bag next to the seat get a hold of it quite a while in advance, in order not to forget it when standing-up, I assume. There’s the checking other standing people – making sure they don’t notice you checking, while they check on you – to understand whether they are looking for a seat or not and just how hungry for it they are. Some can be worse than the drivers! Occasionally, even if someone gets up from one of the four seats on the right, I won’t go for it, particularly if it’s a seat positioned back-wards in relation to the tram’s direction, or if I have to uncomfortably pass through the other seated passengers to reach the newly freed seat at the window. As I’ve come to know the habits of some of the regulars, I will also forego a free seat when I know that a person occupying one of the two nice seats on the left will soon get off. In all of this, the lone seat always remains within my peripheral vision and if the tram isn’t too full, I may hope to get it at some point. Usually, I won’t be standing for long, unless I am specifically eyeing the lone seat, knowing that it will be freed within a reasonable time. How one develops a capacity to understand this is beyond my ability to express it, but it is an actual skill and I am not the only one to possess it. Finally – it always feels like finally – I can take my place in what I privately consider my own personal lounge, the seat, the oasis that allows me to get out of bed, wash and dress myself as if I were an automaton –  all the while thinking: “Soon I’ll be sitting with my book, soon I’ll be sitting with my book… I don’t really have to be awake just yet…”. Right, because all of the above is by now the laborious, yet instinctive, task of that part of my brain, which balances exactly how much or how little work it needs to put into it, how much effort it will be necessary, how sizable a part of walking sleep it will need to sacrifice to the greater good of seating in the right spot for most of the way. Yet there are days when my brain, all of it, loses the battle to my body and just I just sit, slumping, wherever, too late, too far, no book, no awareness, except for the one of the upcoming stop, where I catch – or rather miss – my coincidence…

 

The girlish guy on the tram

There’s this guy on my tram. Sometimes, in the morning, when I am on the late side of my schedule. We both sit in the first part of the tram, not far from the driver. In the evenings I sit in the back, maybe that’s why I never see him then. I say “a guy” because that’s how I’ve come to think of him. That’s certainly also how he thinks of himself. But he might not be a guy. He could very well be a girl. Or someone in between. I can never keep my eyes off him. It makes me feel awful about myself. I think I am open-minded and tolerant. I actually like peculiarity! But when it stares me in the face, I have to stare back. I’m not really able to just take it for granted. I am curious about it. Pfff…! Me, the “citizen of the world”… I keep looking at him. I look for signs to tell me who he is, if he is a she. He has very short, very blond hair. I think it’s naturally blond, but I am not sure. Ha! Good start. His face is a perfect oval. He is very beautiful, his skin very young. He must be in his early 20s now. I started looking at him when he must have been a teenager. In spite of his age, he doesn’t have any facial hair, except for his blond eyebrows, pierced by a small silver ring. His eyes are blue, his nose is straight, delicate. His mouth is also delicate, his lips are not thin, not full. Well, delicate is an adjective that can be used for describing everything about this guy. His face is like a Madonna’s. Sometimes he wears light, silver-rimmed eye glasses. Like me, he probably wears contact lenses sometimes. His body is lean and elegant. I don’t see any sign of breasts. He usually wears shirts and jeans. Today the jeans were pretty tight and I noticed his thighs, his knees, his legs. I think any women would kill for legs like those. They are elongated, harmonious, well proportionate. When he stood – he always gets off the tram before me – I noticed that he doesn’t have hips, but his butt-cheeks somehow don’t look like men’s butt-cheeks. They don’t protrude, turgid and strong. They are not flat either. They have a softness about them, they almost slump a bit. Today he was with his girlfriend and her hips are wide and feminine. She could be just a friend who is a girl, but I do think of her as his girlfriend-girlfriend. She isn’t always with him, just sometimes. I should pay attention to whether or not he wears his eyeglasses when she is with him, consistently. The two things may or may not be related. Today he wasn’t wearing eye glasses. His girlfriend is more masculine than he is. Her nose must have been broken and her make-up and clothes don’t have the same elegance about them as his. Although, really, it’s his own elegance that radiates, not his clothing’s. I always thought that they complement each other well, that he must be attracted by her roughness, as she must be by his femininity. I am fascinated by this guy. By his difference, his mystery and his grace. I wonder about his social life, with family, friends, with the girlfriend. I wonder especially about his thoughts, his view of himself, his emotions. Is he aware of his looking so different? Doest it bother him, it is at all an issue? And I wonder about myself: am I failing in my openness to life and its diversities by scrutinising my tram companion? It feels as if I am. I am ashamed of this behaviour. But I do nothing to stop it. I analyse it at best. I somehow think that my feeling of guilt itself may redeem me in part. I just hope he’s happy. I hope I just think too much, dream too much. I may see something where there is nothing. Or I may see something that is just beautiful as it is. Which is how I feel anyway. My thoughts may be the haziest thing in the whole story. Oh well. I’ll see him again. This comforts me. I like seeing him. I enjoy the sight of his beautiful features. I think he is a luminous presence in my tram, sometimes, in the mornings.

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