There's a Girl Crying on This Train

There’s a girl next to me on this train: she drops tears like the beads of a cheap necklace.
He’s not coming, she breathes to me, a sympathetic stranger. She clamps her phone closed and cries. Not coming. Not coming. The refrain is a closing valve, signaling the soon-shutdown of her whole being and her eyes ask, what should I do? What do I know? What can I tell her? She’s about nineteen in a hopeful white scarf and navy peacoat. There’s a man my father’s age sitting across us doing Sudoku. He shifts his eyes to us for the length of a breath. He comes up for air like a slow moving whale, shakes his head a little. He dives back down into his nonsense puzzle.

Here’s what I know, girl on the train, sobbing over some creep in Brick Church or South Orange who isn’t meeting you. Here’s what I know, old man across the leather seat who should say something to help her, to help me. Inside every man lives another man. Antechamber to antechamber we run, hopeless to find the center. Men: brick walls I’ve scaled all my life. Crawling over you, sliding down you. Once I fell off a roof, a stupid girl in the razor-cold snow, just to prove to them I was interesting and brave.

It’s been a really long time since I’ve cried that hard, I tell the crying girl, reassuring her that you can only hurt like that over love a few times in your life.

And then we started laughing, because the man across the seats from us had fallen asleep, and his mouth rolled open, like he was dreaming about his first kiss.