The Wandering World

He’s been taking this journey on the Northern line for the best part of a decade now, the same seven or so stops towards Kings cross; and despite moving home and changing jobs several times, peculiarly, this one section has remained.

It’s only in recent months that this routine part of his day has been injected with a dose of excitement, however. He experiences it every time he sees her, a profound, ineffable feeling that borders on mystical. While initially he thought he’d simply had too much caffeine, or not enough sleep, the sensation has only intensified. Each time, without fail, he spots her on his carriage, and it strikes him like a jolt of blissful electricity.

If he were to sum up the feeling in words—which only really serve as vague approximations—the ones he’d choose would be oddly reminiscent or strangely familiar. It’s the uncanny sense of being transported home or reunited with something he thought he’d lost forever.

It doesn’t help matters that he’s bad with faces and even worse with names, or that he meets dozens of new people at work every day. It’s also not beyond the realm of possibility that he’s simply seen the woman on the Underground so often that her face is indelibly etched in his subconscious.

One decidedly inconvenient factor is the presence of physical attraction, which he’d tried to deny the existence of at first. But now, if pressed on it, he would have to concede that her dark skin and fair hair is a somewhat striking combination. Maybe that’s all it is: he likes the way she looks; she stood out to him in the dreary crowd, and he’s developed a growing fascination.

But the more he considers it, the harder it is to shake the feeling that he knew her long before he started noticing her on his morning commute, that his connection to her far transcends a simple recognition of a fellow Central-London traveller. She’s ethnically ambiguous: middle eastern, mediterranean, or perhaps mixed race. Her wavy flaxen hair is likely not its natural colour—for all he knows it could be a wig. Aside from this he knows nothing about her; he’s never even heard her speak.

This morning, she climbs on at Borough, instead of London Bridge. All the seats in the carriage are occupied and he’s hanging on a handle near the back. After she positions herself at the handrail directly opposite, their eyes meet, more than once. And as it has many times now, the same sentence dances on the tip of his tongue:

‘Excuse me. Have we met before?’

He flirts with it, imagining his mouth making the necessary movements, considering how it might be received. Then he rephrases, inventing more tentative openings:

‘Sorry, this is an odd question but…’

‘Hi, I don’t mean to bother you. It’s just…’

He spends a minute crafting the perfect line and then immediately abandons it.

It’s just too forward, too bold and imposing. The tube is not the place to strike up conversations with strangers. It’s an innately dicey, unnerving locale, especially for women, he knows this. He opens his phone and tries to forget the whole silly affair.  

But as the woman steps out of his life once more, moving to the doors to exit at Angel, the frisson of eerie DeJa’Vu returns and overcomes him, overpowering all other sensations, groaning like a ghost from the ether, tugging on his heart with the promise of a revelation it can’t quite express. He’s felt this exact feeling before, this presence, this energy. If only he knew when, and where, and what it meant. This isn’t just some juvenile crush or blithe infatuation.  It’s a powerful secret behind a screen door, an aura of shrouded enlightenment, of mysterious poignancy.

But later that night he thinks on it again and the feeling is absent. Now the woman is abstract and the whole idea seems frivolous. Suppose she’s just some client or clerical assistant, some suit amongst his ocean of drab interactions, his endless consultations and meetings. Like most of life’s great mysteries, there’s likely a dull explanation. Perhaps he pursued the woman at a nightclub one night, spoke to her even, before alcoholic amnesia set in and all but erased her. She could even be an obscure actress or model, some minor celebrity whose image seized a dormant part of his brain. Yes, with the benefit of logic and scrutiny the whole thing can be discounted as ridiculous, reasoned away by some unidentified truth.

He lays his head on his pillow upon this thought, and the finality of it gives him comfort, calming his mind, which immediately surrenders to sleep.

His unconscious mind, however, has clearly not given up on the matter.

He stumbles onto a tube carriage the size of a football field, with rows of seats as far as he can see, all of them occupied. He grips a handrail as the train hurtles along at frightening speed and soon realises that every passenger on board has their head turned away from him. They all have long blonde wavy hair worn in varying styles and duly ignore him when he tries to address them. Eventually the enormous carriage hurtles to a shuddering stop and all of the passengers start to funnel through the exits, hundreds of them streaming out in single file. As the last few are leaving, he decides to follow. But they quickly break into a run as he does so. And when he gives chase, he finds himself in a bright open field. ‘Wait!’ he shouts. He sprints through corn fields, then sand dunes, running faster and faster until the field morphs into infinite corridor and only one of the fleeing passengers remains running ahead of him. It’s her. He knows it. No amount of chasing will have him give up. When he shouts again, surprisingly, this time she hears him and turns back. He was right, it is her, and she’s no less than thrilled to see him. She rolls out a picnic blanket on the floor and they sit down to chat. She calmly explains everything. This is not his first life, nor is it hers. Each of their souls have been reincarnated countless times past. Every birth, death and rebirth is part of a pivotal lesson on the wearisome path to Nirvana. Crucially though, some souls are entangled, entwined in profound unknowable ways. Then their lifecycles end and the souls spirit away. But they return again to reform their connections, living out another lesson, a new cycle of the wandering world. He offers nothing in response, simply smiling, nodding at her, knowing that every word she’s uttered is perfectly true. Then she smiles back and says she’ll see him soon.

He wakes to the piercing tones of his phone alarm, with the feeling that he’s just fell from a great height. Moments of his dream are still lingering in his hazy awareness, floating by like spirits moving onto the next realm. He remembers chasing a woman through a field. The vivid patchwork of a picnic blanket. He smiles, feeling at peace, and not remotely groggy; it must have been a restful sleep. Within minutes he’s forgotten he dreamt at all.

Later, on the Northen line towards kings cross, the woman climbs onto his carriage.

She stands square on to him, gripping the railing.

After about a minute she peers directly into his eyes.

With a faint and slightly nervous smile she says, ‘Sorry to bother you, but this has been bugging me for some time. Have we met before?’