Twinkly piano melodies danced out of the window above me as I shuffled down the icy cracked sidewalk in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood. Despite the frigid air I stopped to listen to the simple notes swirl into the sky like a bunch of bubbles in a park. I didn’t know the song but that was fine. I appreciated the musicianship. It was sad but pretty, purple and white at the same time.

The music stopped and even though I waited for it to return, all I heard was the steady grind of traffic and a couple of cacophonous car horns reminding me I should hurry to the train. The red line was down this way, the Bryn Mawr stop. I had been living in Chicago for I don’t know, five years, and never thought to live a little closer to the train. I always figured a lengthy walk to the el station was part of being a working class worker man down here. Nobody lives IN the city. You live OUTSIDE the city and ship yourself in.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. Commuting is boring. I want to talk about what happened next. I rushed up the stairs to catch an arriving train, zipping like a frantic catastrophe. Everyone knows this feeling. PERFECT TIMING CATCH THE TRAIN DON’T MISSSSSSSSSS ITTTTTTTTTTT. This situation is a lottery and everybody wins eventually. You run up there and are the last one in through the doors as they rattle shut. It feels great, like you beat the system this time. Not going to happen next time, or the time after that, but it will again, you just don’t know when. You just wait and see. I like seeing this happen to people at other stops. There’s always somebody, and their faces are always the same. They were that station’s winners.

I huffed my victorious energy out in the form of large dragon-like plumes of moisture. I was probably wild-eyed.

“Made it,” said somebody behind me.

I turned around. A woman stood there. “Yeah.”

“Feels good, right?”

In between breaths I managed to grunt “Yeah” again.

There was a silence, during which I wondered how I should break it, if I should break it, and whether breaking it would be entering a social contract that I was allowed to break. She was shorter, seemed simultaneously twenty-two and forty-nine. I don’t know how that works but it does with some people. Maybe it was all the layers everyone has to wear in early February, or maybe it was just her. She seemed sad but pretty. Purple and white at the same time. I don’t know. All these thoughts taking my brain on an extended field trip into the twilight zone.

“Headed to work then?”

“Yeah, work.” I had no more energy for this. All of it was spent speeding up the slippery Bryn Mawr steps! I was still reeling from that! I just wanted to stand here and recover. I didn’t want to talk. I thought back to earlier, before I left my apartment: did I take my morning dose? I think so.

The girl picked up on my tone and gave me a dismissive grin, more of a pressed pair of lips than a grin honestly. A grim grin, I call those. She looked away, down, back to the floor.

That’s all that happened on the train. I replayed it over in my mind and realized I didn’t handle it too well. Something like that happens once a week if I’m being honest, whether it’s at Green Gardens ordering a coffee, in the elevator at MagiTech, or on a train during my commute. Every time I think my life just forked again: I made the wrong turn down another scenic but abandoned road, sad but pretty.