acquaintances
There was a man I met yesterday. His lips were thin and his eyes were firm, jaded stones worn from years at work perched in an office chair with a potbelly hanging over the ledge of the worn belt around his waist, from years of coming home with crumbles of blueberry muffin on the left side of his beard, from years of sitting alone in the train when commuting home, kind of thinking about work but also kind of thinking about nothing, about nothing even until the moment he unlocks the door with a click that echoes through the 2am hallway of the empty apartment, thinking about nothing even as he opens a beer in the fridge to lean his arched back into a couch already sunken in for him. That was the man I saw yesterday when I lined up to buy a train ticket.
I looked at him once and he looked at me once and then we looked at each other at the same time and he left for his train and I left for mine. I never got to say a proper good-bye.