On the way back home, she has an idea. Admittedly, it’s not a crazy-going-to-make-me-a-gazillionaire idea (J.K. Rowling, much?), but it’s a pretty good idea nevertheless:

She’s going to watch people. And she’s going to wonder about them.

For real, this time.

Take that guy over there, for instance, the one helping the old lady pick up her dropped change. He has an open, pleasant face. Telltale white cords dangle from his ears to the pocket of his baggy black jeans. He is wearing a band tee, though she cannot read the name emblazoned on his chest.

He hands the last coin to the woman and straightens up, swaying slightly from the inertia of the moving train. The old woman smiles her gratitude and he turns, hauling a dark messenger bag onto his shoulder.

She watches him over the top of her book (Catch-22 by Joseph Heller) as he settles into a seat. He glances up and their eyes meet – sprung!

She smiles thinly and buries her nose in her book, though really, she’s wondering.

Wondering where he bought his shirt from. What kind of music he has on his iPod. Where he’s going, what his friends are like (if he has any), whether or not he likes tequila. (Boxers or briefs or neither?) Whether or not he has a girlfriend.

The second that thought leaves the black vortex in her mind whence all thoughts originate, he glances up at her and smiles. Immediately, horrible pop boy-band love-song crap starts blasting in her ears.

She almost swears aloud. Instead, she fumbles in her pocket for her iRiver, wondering how this travesty of music found its way onto her mp3 and, subsequently, onto her playlist. Such songs should not be allowed to violate her ear canals, ever.

By the time she’s found a safe, sap-free haven in The Killers and Emery, her heart rate has returned to normal and the guy with the band tee is gone.

It suddenly occurs to her that, although she spends a lot of her time in cars, on trains and busses, she’s not really going anywhere. She’s never gone anywhere to stay; she’s always moving and traveling and what have you.

The epiphany is slightly freeing, but at the same time it’s stifling. Suddenly the once-white walls of the train, and the once-white walls of her life, seem to be closing in on her. Like the claustrophobic cubicle dividers of a lavatory in hell. (Ironically, the bathrooms in hell have no graffiti on the walls.)

Suddenly she feels about forty years old. It’s like being trapped in liberty is oppressing her freedom, or her freedom is oppressing her liberty to be trapped, or maybe, just maybe, she’s finally losing her mind.

Is she going insane? The question spins in her mind like a million odd socks in the world’s largest front-loading washing machine. Except that there’s no washing powder. And it’s stuck on spin cycle for eternity.

She decides that being almost-insane is like being Schrödinger’s unfortunate feline: both dead and alive at the same time. Or perhaps it’s like being wrapped in the largest, warmest blanket ever invented, but at the same time, naked and clinging to the top of a V-Line train, exposed to the chill wind.

Or perhaps she’s perfectly sane, and all this is happening because he is in China. Yes, he’s in China! Is it too much to ask for someone to inform her of these developments?

Nobody ever tells her anything these days… But everyone always tells her too much anyway, so maybe it’s for the best.

She wonders if this is all worth it, writing down her thoughts for the world to see. But maybe it’s not worth not writing it all down, because there might be some guy on the other side of the world that reads this in the short interval of time before he milks his four hundred pet cats… And perhaps it makes him smile.

And just thinking that, she knows her job is done.