I often wonder what people think as they sit on trains - are they wondering about the day’s events either preceeding or to follow this ride? Are they replaying last night’s embarrassment over and over in their minds as their cheeks slowly redden, remember how they tried to kiss that cutie in the club and only got cheek? Or maybe they’re silently cursing the excited old lady, sitting two seats down, animatedly describing something or other to her equally snow-peaked complanion, who’s inadvertently preventing them from catching a nap on the 22 minute journey from Dover to Bugis, yet speaking in an incomprehensible tongue such that they can’t even listen in on the conversation while being kept awake.

Pondering over what lone, taciturn passengers’ thoughts could be has always been that much more entertaining than simply listening in on conversations between friends (though, when weird enough, that proves fairly amusing too). It’s far more fulfilling to let your imagination run wild on what you don’t have very much chance of ever finding out, than trying to pick out the tune those three giggly schoolgirls with their bulging NTUC Fairprice plastic bags are trying to listen to on someone’s mobile, sneaker-clad feet straddling the bags, brows knit in united concentration. Their attention is broken collectively as the tune ends and the short-haired owner of the mobile phone looks expectantly at the other two. Alas, the background roar of the train barrelling though the tunnel has proven overwhelmingly loud and drowned out the tinny MIDI file; it’s a lost cause.

Across the carriage, again, we spy the exasperated eavesdropper - his face visibly loosening in relief as the old lady has reached her destination.

Perhaps - though it would seem rather conceited and presumptuous to think this - that lanky, shy-looking boy, three seats to my right and across the aisle, has seen me glancing furtively around the carriage and is not studying the glass panel behind my head as studiously as he would have me believe and pondering over some other preoccupation of his, but, rather, he’s wondering what I could possibly be scribbling so furiously away in my little black book, what those two funny triangular edges poking out from the top and bottom of my moleskine are (a folded napkin on which I wrote a letter to my lover while waiting alone in a bar in Bangkok for her, and subsequently forgot to give to its intended recipient), why I seem so interested in the middle-aged, fairly well-dressed auntie who’s staring unabashedly at the loving couple next to her and turning to whisper disapproval to her husband, why my writing seems to have sped up - if the stop that’s just been announced over the PA system has my name written on its list of passengers alighting, and if the reason behind the smile that just spread across my face is someone, whose name and face he will never know, who I’m about to meet for lunch.

It is.