He Sat Down and Told Me My Own Week

He sat down across the table from me on a half-empty train, uninvited, when there were plenty of other seats, and I did the British thing of resenting it in silence and looking pointedly out of the window. Then he started talking, and I stopped looking out of the window.

He told me about my week. Not fished for it — told it. He began with Monday's meeting, naming the project, the tension in the room, the colleague who'd undermined me; he described it as though he'd been there, in specific detail, the wrong-coloured slides, the thing my boss said. I assumed, coldly, that we'd met, that I'd forgotten him, that he knew my work somehow. Then he moved to Wednesday, to an argument I'd had with my partner, at home, behind a closed door, that no one else on earth had witnessed — the subject of it, the thing I'd said that I regretted, the way it had ended unresolved. He told it to me gently, like a man reminding me of something, and my skin went cold.

He knew about the decision. The big one, the private one, the thing I'd been turning over all week and told absolutely no one, not my partner, not a friend, not a diary — a choice about my future I was carrying alone. He described it. He described both options as I'd weighed them, in my own framing, using a phrase I'd used only inside my own head. And then he told me which one I was going to choose, kindly, as a matter of fact, not a prediction but a report, the way you'd tell someone the score of a match they'd missed.

He never once asked me anything. That's the part I can't hold. A con artist, a cold reader, a mentalist works by questions, by watching your face, by fishing and refining. He fished for nothing. He asked for nothing. He simply narrated my week to me, the seen parts and the utterly unseen parts, for about forty minutes, in a calm, almost tender monologue, while I sat frozen and said, I think, not a single word.

And then the train slowed for a station, and he stood, and he patted the table once, and he said, 'You'll make the right call. You always were going to,' and he stepped off onto the platform and was gone into the crowd, and the doors closed, and the train pulled away, and I sat there having been told my own life by a stranger who wanted nothing and asked nothing and knew everything.

I made the decision he said I would. Of course I did. I'd known which way I was leaning; that's the escape hatch, the rational out, and I've clung to it. But he knew the argument behind the closed door. He knew the phrase from inside my head. And I've spent a long time since on trains, watching who sits down, half-dreading and half-hoping that a stranger will join my table and tell me, uninvited, gently, exactly how the rest of it goes.