It was early Monday morning and he was taking Commuter Rail to work. The train was approaching his stop. Getting up from his seat, he queued in the aisle behind several other passengers who were also lining up to get off. The car was crowded and quiet. Lost in thought he went over the topics for a meeting scheduled later that morning.
The train swayed and he balanced himself with his hand on the back of a seat. He looked down at the woman seated with her back to him. A sudden feeling of familiarity came over him as he noticed her hair- reddish orange, frizzy, with two braids falling on her jean-jacket covered shoulders. He couldn’t look away.
She slowly turned her head and looked up at him. Her green eyes, the freckles on her cheeks -he was astonished.
Caitlin!?!
And in the instant he thought it was her, the woman’s face changed into that of a red-haired, green-eyed, stranger. It was a shock. He couldn’t believe it. He locked eye-contact for too long with the stranger, hoping impossibly that it was Caitlin. He braced himself on the back of the seat again.
“I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
He got off the train stood for a moment on the busy platform. It all came back. Caitlin was dead. She died of an overdose fiver years earlier, in a bathtub. He didn’t want to, but he imagined her floating like Millais’ Ophelia-only nude. It was a creepy thought. He hadn’t known her very well. She was one of the casualties. But he remembered she was beautiful.
He looked around the platform. The train was gone. The crowd thinned out.
He re-focused on the meeting and headed towards work.
copyright 2016 Christopher Donahue