the 07:42

In the stillness of repetition, a brief encounter becomes the start of something unknown

For three years I’ve taken the same train, at the same time, each weekday morning. I’ve stood in the same place on the platform, the concrete probably knows the shape of my shoes, because I like steady things, and I like knowing what happens next, and routine makes the day feel less like something I have to negotiate.

I arrive early enough that I don’t have to hurry, and I let the familiar details settle me: the scuffed yellow line, the smell of damp coats after rain, the faint metallic whine of trains not yet arrived. The platform has its regular faces, but one has become a big part of my life without ever entering it.

She stands a little further along, never close enough for our shoulders to brush, and she looks up when she sees me and smiles with the same radiant warmth. We always say good morning, and that’s my favourite moment in each day.

All I know about her is what I can see. I don’t know if she lives with someone, or has children, or a life so full that my noticing her would only be an inconvenience. That ignorance is partly what keeps me quiet. The other part is the weight of my own hesitation, resting in me like a heavy stone.

Still, I think about her when I rinse a mug at the sink, when I walk home through crowds that never meet each other’s eyes, when I lie awake after a decent day and my thoughts settle on the smallest details of hers: the coat, the bag, the way she watches the track patiently. I’d be mortified if anyone knew how much time I’ve spent thinking about someone whose name I don’t even know.

Sometimes, in my quiet moments, I sense a deep, silent risk in all this steadiness, the risk that my life is becoming a series of perfectly repeated motions: the rinsed mug, the same walk, the same spot on the platform, and that her smile is the only variable, the only proof I haven’t become a ghost in my own story.

I’ve rehearsed asking her name so often on my walk to the station, the words have worn grooves in my mind. I imagine her confused politeness, her quiet rejection, or worse, the laughter that would torment the inside of me for years. The longer I wait, the harder it becomes, because after three years even the smallest look in my direction feels enormous.

Lately, I have been telling myself that I must do it, that if I stay silent, I will drift through a life that never changes because I’m too careful to disturb it. I planned to ask her when the platform was quiet, when my sleep had been good, when the words might come out clean.

The morning I finally chose was as ordinary as any other. The sky hung low, the air smelled of rain, and I stood by the railing, steadying myself. I would greet her, and then I would ask. Nothing more.

When she turned, her smile was exactly as it had always been. I said good morning and waited for my courage to appear, but before I could speak, she tilted her head slightly and said that it was strange to realise she didn’t even know my name, and she asked what I did for work.

At first, I could only look at her, because it felt impossible that she had chosen this day, of all days, to say the words I had clutched for months. It was as if the world had turned something over and aligned us in a moment of quiet symmetry. I am not someone who believes in signs, yet I felt the faint hum of something larger, the sense that the universe had given permission.

I told her my name, and she told me hers, and the sound of it echoed like something I’d once dreamed but forgotten, until now. The train was late, but she didn’t seem to mind. We spoke quietly, exchanging small details that would mean little to anyone else, but to me, each word felt like the shifting of a boulder, slow, unstoppable, and long overdue.

When the train arrived and we boarded with the rest of the crowd, I could feel the adrenaline moving through me as if I had done something dangerous, and I stood near the doors pretending to be ordinary while my mind replayed our conversation and the sound of her name.

A few seats down, she turned her head and found me again, and she smiled with the same radiant warmth as always, except that now it felt as if the earth had shifted a fraction on its axis. I smiled back, a full and unguarded one, and I held that smile like a secret, unsure whether this was a beginning, or simply the best ending I could have asked for.