Little Girl On the Tube

A few days it’s been since I rode the Orange tube out from Enoch, nothing new. Amusing myself with literature, the glue that contends our oneness. As I dissolved and fancied myself unique from all the goers to and fro, mouthing Hamlet in perfect tune to shaky stops, I didn’t notice her nestled across the seated cue, between what must’ve been her parents. It was probably the usual. Maybe at the start she was studying my shoes, but began to observe with eyes new as only children can, how a woman can be both present and not, smiling with ease over a simple recitation. But with a strange look of pleasure more common to drunks, or the newly in love if it happens on the tube. Maybe she was taking stock of options. All the ways she could be, what feminine gestures seem most beautifully procured. And when it came to her stop, between the two she was ushered to depart, though not before I looked up to see her watching as she walked. For a flicker of a moment, she smiled and waved so quick, as if to hold the action easily downplayed. But too I waved, and so brightly she smiled at the reciprocation, that I remembered how the warmth of something given without reason, needs no reason at all.