To the unknown people of my heart

This is my joy: precious and passing connections, shared moments of warmth and light that linger in a stained glass glow of significance. I welcome each of you to my heart. 

It happens less often now than it did when I was young and on my own and life had little privacy. Recently, though, I found a myself sitting on a crowded, evening train next to a girl, glowing 17-year old skin beneath a dark head-covering. As I contemplated plugging in to a podcast, I noticed that she was not really looking at her phone, and so I spoke.  

"Have you been shopping?"

"No, I'm going home to see my Dad."

And so it began, an hour's conversation punctuated by comfortable pauses that grew less as the time went by. She was a catering student, a former atheist who had sought religion and, finding the Catholicism of one side of her ancestry wanting, turned to Islam. We discussed all we had in common, our desire to see the world a better place, our disquiet with the hatred that divides nations, our longing for everyone to find human connection instead. We talked about the histories of our religions. We talked about our hopes and dreams and experience. We talked about our families and what we like to do with our time. And then the train pulled into her stop: "Goodbye, goodbye, what a wonderful talk, how good to put the world to rights, goodbye, may all go well with you," and since then she has popped in and out of my thoughts and I bless her with all that is good and whole. 

She shall pop into my mind now and then for the rest of my life, and I shall wonder how she fared, just as I wonder about the older girl I met on a bus when I was 17. She was sad, and our conversation was good, so I took her for a coffee in McDonalds when we arrived. She was the first person to tell me, unbidden, that I was pretty and so cracked the shell of body dysphoria - something she shall never know. And I wonder, this perfectly made up girl, did she ever discover she was lovely enough not to need a man-made face?

I wonder about my fellow-travellers on the Mosel-Schwarzwald train when I was 20. The English-Danish lad worried about the environmental impact of a mooted connecting bridge between Germany and Denmark - did he keep up the fight? The tall, thin Dutch law student, how cadaverous his face - did he end up as I pictured him, thundering justice in the courts from dark and glaring eyes? The joyful, joy-sharing American girls, larger than life with vast suitcases we had to shift every time the refreshments trolley passed by - was their Geneva university adventure all they hoped it would be?  

I wonder about the young mathematician I met on a flight from Hong Kong - the one who was the secret love of a fellow-student - did their plans to stay together work out? I wonder if he remembers the young woman who traded stories and bought him an overpriced coffee in Geneva airport when our onward flight was delayed. In return, he taught me backgammon and I set to with Ludo logic - keep the last counter up with the rest - and he said, amazed, that no-one had ever come so close to beating him before. 

And what of the kind and steadily sozzling business men on the plane to Beijing? The retirees returning to the UK in February after 18 months following the summer around Australia? The tipsy woman in a crowd of drunken Irish football fans on the Machynlleth train, who discovered I was a student and spent the rest of the journey telling them to shut up because she thought the long letter I was writing to a friend was an essay. The junior doctor on the train from Cardiff who noticed the book I was reading and fell asleep mid-sentence after a 49-hour week, and was sleeping still when I later disembarked. The girl who offered me a Twix on the Paris-Strasbourg train that I refused because I was embarrassed to have been caught staring in hunger, so long after breakfast and with dinner yet hours away. 

And all the tiny moments, shop assistants ready to chat during a lull, fellow-queuers at the door, people at the next table in a coffee shop or pub. Yes, the weather is lovely, the weather is awful, the cakes look amazing, the service is slow, how awkward our glances as someone unmoored shouts in the street outside, oh, what a lovely dog - may I?  

There are, too, missed connections I do not care to remember - the suddenly-seen discomfort of someone in the line of a self-absorbed scowl, the ghost of rejection from a person I just passed by unseeing, the smile withheld from the searching eyes. 

This is how it is. We are not islands unmoving as life streams by, nor are we the big fish that shape the world's tides: we are the little fish flashing silver and speckled and olive dark, each in our own little eddy and every so often nudging another, creating tiny legacies of muddled stories, mind-caught, water-woven images of you, and you, and you, captured as you were in that moment, on that day, at that time, before the waters closed and we moved on.