A young woman is on her way to her father’s funeral in her home town that she doesn’t visit often enough. Her husband sits across the table. Their three-year-old daughter sits beside her and demands her mother’s attention, but her mother is not really there. She looks to her husband for guidance and he attempts to get their daughter’s attention but fails. She wants mummy. She wants mummy to look at the cows outside the window in the fields.
An older gentleman in a tweed suit wrestles with a copy of The Financial Times. He awkwardly unfolds the broadsheet so as not to elbow his seat-mate or knock over his Earl Grey tea in its flimsy paper cup. He takes this journey regularly to see his eldest son at art school in a monthly musical recital. He’s never missed one and never will.
A curly-haired girl sits hunched over her laptop wearing noise-canceling earphones underneath noise-cancelling headphones. Her thesis won’t write itself. She is coming home from spending the weekend with her boyfriend in the city where he studies. She got a little distracted, had a little too much fun, and is paying for it with a raging and persistent headache. She doesn’t regret a thing.
A child in a window seat, guarded from the aisle by his older brother, reads with his legs tucked underneath him. His brother bought him the book for the journey in a library sale and he’s oblivious to the rest of the world while he’s inside the story of dragons and wizards. He wonders if his brother read it when he was his age, he wonders if he might write one himself someday.
Hood up, headphones on, a man sleeps soundly. His head rests on his arms crossed on the tray table in front of him. He’s worked a long shift, as he tends to do. The sun begins to set in vivid colour outside the carriage window, and other passengers are careful not to bump into him as they travel the aisle to grab their bags or use the restroom. We’ve all been there, they each think. So they let him sleep.