An extract from Wise Traveller: Relationships

Once, when travelling on the underground across London, I sort of met someone. My train, rattling and wheel-grinding, had come to a halt somewhere along the Victoria Line, I think, and I was sat looking at nothing through the window opposite. Another train pulled in the other way, the slowing windows flashing by like the gate of a projector, flickering frames of real faces, belonging to real people, lost in transition.

The reel of glass stopped; I was surprised to find myself confronted by an old acquaintance sitting looking at me from the other train. The doors on my train hissed - any meeting was going to be impossible, and no sound could penetrate the quadruple panes between us. So we both waved, and made exaggerated facial expressions, and then grew nervous and didn't know where to look as the trains inexplicably paused. Our gazes wouldn't hold. I expect he laughed about it, as I did, but later this cold truth hit me: this was a perfect urban encounter. My hard and busy heart hadn't really wanted its equilibrium to be disturbed. We had waved and seemed glad, but only once the safety of our separate shores had been established.

And now I wonder how many other people I nearly meet each day. How many other lonely gazes do I refuse to hold, how many other pleas for love do I deflect away with the calloused defences of my iPod-bubbled world? And I wonder about the one who turned in the midst of a crowded street and could divine this simple question: who touched me? His senses stretching right to the hem of his garment; I clothe myself in labels and close my ears with music and enclose myself in a steel shell to hurtle beneath still-hurting streets afraid that anyone might touch me, irony lurking in my ache for someone to break through my brittle shell and make contact.

Kester Brewin

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