Smoke fills the room in a mist of little, hollow circles. I cough; I am not a good smoker. But smoking hookah is a little different; you have more time to inhale and you can exhale all of it out if you do it the right way. I know no one here; though I have been introduced briefly by name. I listen to their conversations, nod and pretend I exist. I pretend that I am not consumed by the mist that makes everything seem unreal.
I listen and I watch.
When people smoke, it is as if they are revealing something sacred about themselves, something a stranger shouldn’t know about. You look at them and you feel like they are vulnerable, like they will tell you anything, answer any question. Yet they are so lost, so far away, so distant that you find yourself in the same position: distant and unreachable.
I give up as I begin to feel slightly dizzy and watch as someone puffs a perfect loop. The hookah pipe is wrapped around her leg, underneath her boot as she leans back, breathing in and out gusts of smoke. She is 18. The coal continues to burn, the cinder still glowing in the dark. Raindrops begin falling on the ceiling, hard and loud, like ice. You can see the droplets as they cluster in a corner on the hard glass. And if you listen long enough and block out the chatter, the laughter and the sound of coal burning, you can hear the pounding in one long beat.
I forget the names I was introduced to a few minutes ago and I am sure they have forgotten mine. We are probably never going to meet again.
This is a way of passing time, of meeting new people without getting to know them, of talking without really listening or listening without ever talking. It’s a way of smoking through a filtered pipe instead of a socially unacceptable cigarette that you throw out and crush under the sole of your shoe. It’s saying hello and goodbye at the same time to someone you met a day ago.
And sometimes, it’s you believing you are part of a bigger world when you are really just another writer who’s trying to figure things out.

The train moves, steadily, calmly, as if no one is driving, as if taking a walk by the shore on feet. No. It doesn’t feel as if we are moving. The windows are white, but unclear, halfway covered by the seat in front of me. There is a strange smell of staleness that reminds me of antiquity and buried childhood memories. The kind of memories that you must stretch your mind for to remember, feel and touch.
And now, sitting next to a stranger and alone, I think about time, the space between that life and this. That, which was simpler and chosen. This, which is based on decisions, choices, desires and selfishness.
We pass many sights. The trees begin to shift. The lights change; the colors become light. Soon there are trails, empty ones and hollow ones. I watch, drifting between sleep and dreams. I love moving, traveling and falling out of place because I become aware of my senses. I become aware of what I do and what I see and how I react to new things and new people. I like to think of things I don’t have time to think of when I’m in class and restless. I begin to wander, and I do it with a sense of confidence that I only get when I’m alone and a traveler.
None of us has the same destination and yet we are on one journey. In a way, we are together, related through the same track, the same silence that echoes in our ears as we imagine time passing. If we didn’t imagine time moving, we wouldn’t survive. There’d be nothing to hold on to in the future, nothing to dream of, nothing to ponder on. It is this thought, this image of time and of ourselves that makes us travel, keeps us moving along the tracks, keeps us watching the skies change behind shadowed windows and dark trees.
We move farther and farther from the starting point. But there is always the notion of return, the safe and comforting notion that what we leave behind will still remain when we return. That whatever we don’t find in that new time we can go back and recover from the old. It is this return that keeps us safe, eager to taste someone else’s cooking, sleep in someone else’s bed, sit in someone else’s car. It is this return that binds us to the past, to what will always be and unchanged because it is our soul that changes. It is our mind that changes, not the inanimate objects of our past.
The train moves, steadily, calmly and the stranger next to me asks where I am headed to.