Beauty Regimen

If my fingernails are painted, it's to make myself sit still.

Observation -- 5:10 R6, Friday

Everyone on the train wears headphones so that they can be somewhere else. I don’t have them – I’m already too distracted by my own imagination. This means that I can hear the grey-haired man in the peacoat intermittently blowing raspberries. I have been on the train with him before. The noise, and how he sits and stares straight ahead when he makes it, must be inadvertent, or else it’s a sorry cry for attention. I wonder what it must be like to share an office with him, or a public bathroom. I imagine that he goes home each day without incident, removes the coat, and calls out loudly, just to see if he is, in fact, making a sound.