Dear Girl I Exchanged Words with on the Standing-Room-Only LIRR from Montauk to Penn Station on Monday 8/12 at 3:53pm

An open letter

Dear Girl I Exchanged Words with on the Standing-Room-Only LIRR from Montauk to Penn Station on Monday 8/12 at 3:53pm,

Let me begin by saying that I realize how futile this missive is. I really do. I have a sneaking suspicion, from our admittedly brief interaction, that you will not take what I have to say to heart. You’ll smirk and maybe show this to a friend. You’ll say look at this psychotic girl who was on my train on Monday who wrote this whole letter about me for her Substack maybe even she was wearing the ugliest pair of Asics and had greasy hair. If your friend is like you she’ll smirk too. If she’s halfway decent (unlike you), she already secretly hates you, and showing her this letter won’t help matters.

Wait just a second, what the hell?! Who am I to say whether or not you’re halfway decent? Fair question. I, of course, don’t know the first thing about you. Don’t know your life story, don’t know how hungover you were after your Montauk bender (or whatever), don’t know what kind of work nightmare you were dealing with on your shiny Dell (who has a Dell computer anymore?). What I do know, however, is that you think your giant Sporty & Rich canvas tote is more important than a human being you don’t know. You might even think its more important than a human being you do know—but look at me exhibiting restraint—I can’t come down one way or another on that point because no one you knew was on this train.

Let me set the scene, just in case you don’t remember. I got on at Westhampton and poked my head up the stairs, poked my head down, was brought back to the present by one of the several people gathered in the vestibule playfully telling me that we wouldn’t all be standing around here if there were any seats. On a Monday afternoon!? I sidestepped my way past the bathroom and planted myself on my make-shift rolling suitcase seat (this wasn’t my first rodeo). I was cracking open my book when I looked across the way and clocked you.

Sambas, grey sweats, grey sweater, hair pulled back in a bun, fresh-faced (if you were hungover, you didn’t look it!). You were seated on one of the push down benches that fold up to make room for handicapped passengers. They’re admittedly small—the benches—but they’re big enough to seat two people. Next to you though, was not a person, but that damn Sporty & Rich tote.

I contemplated making the request—would you mind………

But I was relatively comfortable where I was and it’s not a very long ride, so I didn’t. But the next woman who passed through did. Walked right up to you and said, not even would you mind, but actually may I sit there? And that’s when, without missing a beat, you looked up and said, I mean, I don’t know where else you want me to put my bag. And it wasn’t just the tone of your voice (egregious), or the added roll of your eyes that struck me as completely outside the realm of all decency, it was also the fact that when I looked at you with a hint of a shocked smile on my lips—to confirm that I wasn’t hallucinating—you actually looked back at me with a can you believe that look. Like I might be on your side!

And so I said, somewhat affronted, well, you could put it up there (pointing to the bag racks overhead) or here (pointing to roller bag next to you that was so far expanded it was practically an end table) or down there (pointing to the open space under your seat). The couple sharing a bench (same size as yours) next to you chimed in—Yeah! You could put it on the floor! The woman who requested the seat was already backing away, but the people in the vestibule were turning their heads.

Was there going to be a good old-fashioned LIRR scene? Alas, no. You said I don’t want to put it on the floor and this seat is tiny and I’ve been standing for hours (hence my Montauk profiling, even though of course, it’s only a singular hour from Montauk to Westhampton on this train).

And that was it. Everyone else exchanged their own actually justified can you believe that looks and went back to minding their own business. And you rode for another hour and forty minutes with your Sporty & Rich tote splayed out on the seat next to you.

Well, I only mostly went back to minding my own business, my business being that book I was cracking open—Romola. Every other chapter I’d look up at you and think about what else I might say to you. What I wanted you to know. Could you feel me looking? Could you feel me silently asking you what made you think that your comfort was more important than anyone else’s? You never did look up again.

Romola is by George Eliot. You might not know that because people just don’t talk about it as much as they talk about her other novels! Middlemarch is the masterpiece, but don’t sleep on Romola. It just so happens that it’s in Romola that Fra Girolamo Savonarola says that we are irrevocably bound to our fellow citizens—tied to them lot for lot, and responsible for them! More than that, he says the bond is sacred!

Sitting there, with my luggage tag digging into my ass, watching the woman who you would not sit with shuffle back and forth every time someone used the door next to her to come use the bathroom, the question of what we owe to each other, what those common human bonds mean for us in a modern world, really hit home for me.

Did you also think the sheer number of people who decided to use the bathroom on this relatively short train ride was kind of absurd? You may not have noticed because you didn’t have to move every time someone else came through, but it was a constant parade.

George Eliot makes me a fanatic for righteousness, and as I sat there, I began to judge you by her standards (very high). Don’t worry though, the other thing George Eliot does to me, or rather for me, is to serve as a reminder that we are all, myself included, constant victims of our own human fallibility. Good people do bad things. Some of those people become bad people. Some of them, however struggle and strive. A good life must be a constant and active effort towards that goodness.

But I could go on forever about that, and this isn’t the time or place (come back next week for more on Romola!). The reason I mention it at all is because I want you to know that sitting there, I tried to put myself in your shoes. I tried to honor our bond and imagine what you might be going through, what struggling or even striving might be going on in your heart and soul. I reminded myself that I too am only human. I too have erred. I too have fallen below my own standards in moments of weakness. Was I truly affronted by your wrongdoing, or just reveling in my own righteousness?

My word will have to be a good enough assurance that I really did do all of this reflecting before I determined that you deserved my judgement and my ire. You see, there is no situation—not one!!!!—that would induce me to behave in the way that you behaved on our train ride. I could be a puddle of tears, mourning, raging, PMSing, hungover to hell, or quite literally bleeding out from one extremity or other, and I would lift my stupid tote bag and toss it on the floor and say, please sit, as long as you don’t mind the tears/vomit/blood.

And so I judge you and I find you wanting. And what I want you to know is that your ungenerousity of spirit makes you an ugly person. I want that sentence and those words to strike a chord, though I know they probably won’t.

I don’t know what will. I don’t know what will save you. In a George Eliot novel, it would be me. I’d see you in the street months from now right after a lumbering delivery truck sped through a dirty puddle, splashing you, in your white fur coat, with NYC sidewalk sludge. Yes, it’s winter in my fantasy. And I would run over to you and say oh yes finally! I can be of service to you, you bitter girl. Except I wouldn’t say the bitter part because I’m magnanimous. Come with me and we can get you cleaned up, and, here I’ll let you borrow my own chocolatey brown mink. That could be the beginning of your transformation, of your striving.

Maybe in real life, some other stranger will have an opportunity—will actually say the words to you that I let die in my throat as I got off at Jamaica. Or more realistically, one of your friends will work up the courage to tell you that you radiate misery. But for any of it to actually work, you will need to start looking at your fellow man as worthy and worthwhile. The striving for good often wants an external impetus, but if it is to really take root and spread, there must be a foundational love, a core sense of reverence for the sanctity of the bonds of humanity. There must be an internal fire that says I must do and be good. Now you must try to light a match and start the fire.

Not really very fondly at all, but with hope for your immortal soul nonetheless,
Eve

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