One of those small non events in life that I still think about from time to time

Perhaps another time I'll explore why small yet necessary interactions makes me weird.

Years ago, and I’m talking years, I was heading to my parents house via train for the weekend and realized, belatedly, that I had left my little flip phone at home. As proof to how long ago this was, this was before literally everyone had smart phones (though I recognize that I was one of the last hold outs in my friend group. I don’t know why, but it was a point of pride). It seems like a near impossibility these days for people to forget their phones as they now double as wallets- dead batteries is the ailment of choice in fiction when you need a character to be stranded.

Photo by Jesse Mills on Unsplash

Anyhow, I was on the train, wondering what to do to let my parents know which one I got on and what time to pick me up. I remember it to be the weekend, perhaps mid morning, as they used the old cars for off peak times, the seats an ugly, brown vinyl, the entire interior of the cars slightly yellowed with age. The double decker cars only ran during rush hour on weekdays.

I tried to think ahead. Pay phones still existed back then- would there be any at the station? How much did it cost to use one? Did I have any change? Did I even know how to use one anymore?

The train car wasn’t super crowded; nobody was sharing a seat, with the population of commuters evenly dispersed throughout the car. I lifted my head to survey my options. The person sitting directly in front of me looked to be the best bet: a girl in her early 20’s, her phone in her hand. Someone just like me, but with the one thing I was lacking.

I used to be one of those people whose heart rate speeds up when I dropped a utensil at a restaurant and would need to flag down a waiter to get me another one. Just trying to catch one of their attentions, despite the fact that it’s a part of their job, makes me awkward, like I’m bothering them. Sometimes it takes me a few minutes of mental prep before I do anything. A line of logic that goes from, ‘I need this, and I cannot do it myself, therefore I must ask this stranger; this interaction is unavoidable so I must get past this discomfort and just do it. This is literally not a big deal, nobody else will remember this but you.’ And then another part of me is like, ‘Don’t be weird, don’t be weird, don’t be weird.’

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still like this, but maybe marginally better at it now that I’m older and care a smidgen less.

So I bided my time as the train headed out of Penn station, glad that we had the whole tunnel under the Hudson River for me to figure out what to say and how. And then, before we hit the first stop in Jersey, I stood up and tapped her on the shoulder.

“Hi sorry I forgot my phone but need to let my parents know I’m on the train so they can pick me up can I borrow and use your phone to call them?” I asked in one long, interrupted sentence.

She had dark brown hair, pulled into a low ponytail and it took her a second to assess this situation. “Yeah, sure,” she said, after a pause.

I stayed standing and made a quick call- luckily one of my parents answered. And the transaction was over. “Thank you, thank you,” I told the girl, overly grateful and on the verge of making it awkward. I sat back down, feeling accomplished.

As the ticket collector started walking up the car, with those three distinct clip clip clip sounds that came from punching holes into tickets, I slotted my own ticket, the destination printed up front and center, under the little strap on the shoulder of the seat. The girl in front of me had done the same earlier and I saw that her stop was New Brunswick, and immediately felt weird and creepy for noticing that.

Yet, creepier still was that I subconsciously kept tabs on her, and was aware that she had fallen asleep, her head bowed forward, her arms wrapped around her backpack, swaying, as we pulled up to the platform of her destination. I panicked for a second, thinking this wasn’t my business but at the same time, I owed her, so I leaned forward, grabbed her shoulder and shook her awake. “Hey, I think it’s your stop!”

She jolted upwards, confused, glanced out the window and threw me a quick ‘thanks!’ as she grabbed her bag and ran off the train right before the doors closed.

It felt good to close that karmic circle, that the payback was almost immediate and sufficient, and for some reason I think about this interaction and the simplicity of it all: I ask for help, receive help, and then I pay it back. Or that maybe it wasn’t simple at all and that I get weirdly obsessive in trying to pay people back and that for the first time I actually and successfully did, with minimal weirdness.