He takes off his knitted cap. His head is steaming in the cold air of the train station, and I watch it curl off into the dark vaulted ceiling.

A girl wedges herself in next to me. Something today has made her pulse quicken, her body temperature rise, whether joy or fear, I can't tell. She smells like a barely tamed animal while she is flipping through The Economist.

The guy across the way is watching her, he has a crush on her tiny nose, her Economist brain, the economical movement of her hands, but he is aging like Art Garfunkel, never handsome and now starting to be painful, and he knows she is out of his league. I'm as close to her as he'll ever get.