Amtrak and Football

I had a lot of trouble relaxing on the Amtrak back home to New York on the last Saturday of September. I was wearing low-rise flare jeans from a Depop seller in Kentucky. They are great jeans for standing and for sitting very upright, which was the very last thing I wanted to do. Unbuttoning them was not an option; it would make me feel like I was getting fat and being impolite. So I sucked it up and in, because the train ride was only going to be a few hours. 

I got tired of scrolling on Instagram, seeing all the posts of people I know at the football game. It was all the same thing in different fonts. I had to leave the game early to make my train, and I missed Brown win against Harvard for the first time in 14 years. At least I think it was 14. I don’t really care about football. 

It was a cloudy afternoon, and Connecticut was looking esepcialy unimpressive. I had Fiona Apple and Lana Del Rey blasting in my airpods because I decided for no reason that I wanted to be melancholy and contemplative today. I kept telling myself to look at the houses that sit next to the train tracks and imagine the people who live in them, but my eyes kept focusing on the dirt residue on the plexiglass windows instead. 

At about an hour in, a man in his sixties sat next to me. He arrived with another man in his sixties, his friend, and they both wore worn out looking flannel shirts. But the one who sat next to me wasn’t wearing a bucket hat. 

I was in no mood for a stranger to sit next to me. I had already decided that I wanted to be melancholy and contemplative, and a stranger sitting next to me would most definitely impede on this plan of mine. But the train was crowded. And he seemed nice enough. 

I started to wonder if the man next to me knew I came straight from the “white out” themed Harvard vs. Brown football game, and that’s why I was wearing a white tank top and blue jeans. He definitely didn’t. But I like to make up stories about people in my head.

So I decided that he probably wouldn’t have liked that I left a little before halftime. And if he asked why I did that, I would have to explain that I was getting overstimulated by all the people, my phone having no service, my freshly blown out hair getting completely ruined and cruchy from the humidity and wind, and that someone that was stressing me out was most definitely nearby and therefore leaving the game early with my friend was really the most logical option.

I reminded myself of how bizarre it was to create that false narrative. If I said all this to this complete stranger, in reality he would probably be nice enough to me, but maybe he secretly would judge me, thinking I’m superficial and lack all school spirit. Because that’s probably how my story sounds. 

But none of this happened. And I just spent 20 minutes of my precious youth making up a random, probably very self indulgent tale about what a stranger thinks of me that benefited me in no real way at all. All he’s seen me do is shuffle some songs on Spotify, fix my lip-liner in my tiny hand rose gold held mirror, and eat vegan butter flavored popcorn. He probably didn’t think about me at all. 

He fell asleep for a good portion of the train ride, and I was happy about that because the reflective but reductive attitude I adopted was turning very self-conscious and negative. If he was asleep he couldn’t perceive me anymore. “Stop it. You’re acting like a weirdo.” I yelled at myself in my head. I yelled at myself in my head a bunch of different ways. I just wanted to snap out of it. Was this my social anxiety acting up or was I just an egomaniac? Maybe I shouldn’t have had a Black Cherry White Claw for breakfast. 

I felt bad when I had to wake the stranger up because I had to use the bathroom. He wasn’t asleep asleep. It was more of a “I’m just resting my eyes” asleep. He got up quickly and I walked down that train aisle even quicker.

When I looked at myself in the mirror of the tiny bathroom that smelled like both piss and pine sceneted cleaning products, I thought that my hair still looked crunchy, I paid too much for a ticket on this shithole, and that I used a too much of my brain capacity to imagine all the ways that some stranger would dissaprove of me, when I didn’t even articulate one thought about him. 

I didn’t think about who he was. Where he was coming from. Where he was going. Why he kept looking at an interactive weather map on his phone. Nothing. He was just busy being his own person. And I was busy worrying about all the assumed reasons he would disapprove of me. A total stranger.

Maybe I was just projecting because I was insecure. I didn’t really know about what. And if you asked me in the moment I probably would have said “everything. And my hair looks horrible.” It was probably something deeper than my hair looking crunchy from hairspray. But can I even call it projecting if I didn’t say a single word out loud? 

When I got back to my seat, the man was back to looking at interactive maps on his phone. I have a bad habit of staring at other people’s phone screens and he noticed me looking. 

“I’m tracking my boat,” he said. 

But “American Whore” by Lana Del Rey was playing a little too loud for me to understand. In miliseconds I felt anxiety wash over my body. I just built up a fake interaction with this man, and now I’m about to have a real one. I took out my airpods really quick.

“Sorry, what did you say?”

“I said, I’m tracking my boat. On my phone. It’s amazing what phones can do now, right?”

“Yeah. It is really amazing.” 

We chatted for about 20 minutes, about his boat going from Connecticut to New Jersey, his New Jersey upbringing, and his favorite restaurant that was also in New Jersey. He was really nice. He did not have a Jersey accent, in fact he sounded like he was from California. He loved that I asked about the name of his boat. Her name is Ophelia. 

“She’s not named after anyone or anything like that. I just love that name.”

I like that name too. I like that boats always have girl’s names. I told him that if I had a boat I would name her “Athena or Aphrodite.” I don’t know if I still agree with that. But he said those names were beautiful. 

When it was time for me to get off the train, he helped me get my suitcase down from above the seats, and told me to have fun at my Mom’s art opening. He asked what I was doing while I was in New York for the weekend. I didn’t want to tell him the real reason was that I needed more Adderall. I am prescribed, but still. I really was heading straight to the gallery she was showing her work at. 

As I walked with my turquoise suitcase with one broken wheel for twenty Manhattan blocks, I didn’t put my airpods back in. I looked at all the people I passed. I didn’t know anything about any of them. And they didn’t know anything about me. And that felt good.