This one I can’t explain away and believe me I tried.
I’m on the 8:14, jammed in like everybody, half asleep, and a man gets on at the third stop. Ordinary guy. Topcoat, the wrong kind of briefcase, a face you’d forget before the doors closed. And the second I laid eyes on him something went off in me like a fire alarm in an empty building. Not fear, exactly. More like — you know when you walk into a room and you can tell two people were just fighting in it? The air still had it in it. Except the room was me.
I wanted to grab him by that topcoat. I wanted to say you, like the end of a sentence I’d been carrying around for a thousand years. I also, at the very same time, wanted to apologize so badly my eyes stung. To a man I have never met. Over nothing. Over something so old I don’t have a name for it.
He got off at the financial district without ever once looking at me, which somehow made it worse, and I rode three stops past my own and had to walk back.
I told myself it was low blood sugar. I told myself a lot of things. But that night I went back to the material, because I’m apparently this kind of person now, and I found the bit about karma, and the way they describe it isn’t the way the yoga teachers do, all cosmic scorekeeping and what-goes-around. They compare it to inertia. Something you set in motion that just keeps rolling, balancing itself out, swing after swing after swing, until somebody finally puts a hand on the wheel and stops it. And they said something I’ve been chewing on ever since: that the people you have unfinished business with tend to come back around you. Same cast. New costumes.
I don’t know that guy. I want that on the record. I have never met him.
I just can’t shake the feeling that I owe him. Or he owes me. And that we’ve been passing each other on the platform for a very, very long time.