It's a Small, Small Metro World

I’ve been riding the same Metro line for the better part of the past four years, getting on and off at the same stops, to the point where I can tick off the stops from memory without really thinking about it. Over time, you start to see a lot of the same people, and while you probably don’t get to know them, they do become very familiar to you. For example, the guy who I will always remember as a candidate for anger management classes because one day he ran up the stairs and just missed the train. So he started banging on the door and cursing the driver as the train pulled away. He’s never done anything like that since then (not that I’ve witnessed, anyway), but whenever I see him, I think that there must be a lot more suppressed anger boiling away in there. Can’t help it.

There’s the woman who has the most hard-core mullet I have ever seen in my life. It is ALL business up front, and one wild and crazy party in the back, my friends. She is an otherwise perfectly normal looking woman, who is probably very nice and maybe has a few kids my age who may occasionally think “holy crap, Mom – please do something about that!”, but she is always the Mullet Lady to me.

The couple who have gone from dating, to engaged, to married (based on the occasional observance of rings being added) and are just so into each other that, regardless of the weather or Metro delays, they form their own little cocoon of cuteness on the platform. The fact that they manage not to be nauseating in the process is also quite nice.

There are plenty of other people that I see every day, and were I to see them elsewhere in my real life I would wonder where I knew them from, it’s just funny how people you don’t know at all can still be so familiar.

Of course, then there was the guy I saw out of the corner of my eye last night. He was slumped over the seat in front of him, and I saw him look furtively around the car before resting his head back down again. Then I heard a splashing sound. Like someone was dumping a large bucket of gumbo out onto the floor. Followed by another prolonged splashing sound. The people in our car began to look vaguely alarmed, and I knew that I would have to take quick action to avoid implementation of my rule.

You see, I have a very strict rule. This rule is that no one vomits alone in my presence. No one.

At this point, I could only hear what was going on, there was no visual and no smell to accompany it. So at the next stop, the one before mine, I leapt out of the car and ran down the platform, stepping into the car behind it. I just didn’t have confidence that I could make it all the way to my stop if he continued to do the ol’ Technicolor™ yawn. I felt, and feel, so incredibly bad for whatever Metro employee got stuck cleaning up after this guy – that can’t have been a remotely pleasant experience.

The Anger Management Candidate seemed to want to get off the train as quickly as I did.