The rain had found the one gap in the platform canopy and was using it with great commitment.
Drip. Pause. Drip. Right onto the corner of my suitcase.
My coffee had gone from hot to warm to something I was finishing out of politeness. Around me, people stood in damp coats with their shoulders up. The platform smelled of wet wool and the almond pastries someone two benches down had carried out of the kiosk in a warm paper bag. Above us, the departure board flickered. My train blinked, vanished, then reappeared ten minutes later than before.
“We apologise for the delay,” the speaker crackled, for the third time. It did not sound sorry. I didn’t blame it.
On my phone, a message to my sister sat half-typed.
I’m fine, just a lot going on right now, I’ll call when I can
When I what. I had been staring at that cursor since the second announcement.
“Your suitcase is getting rained on.”
I looked down. And it came from a little girl around six or maybe seven years old, she sat on the bench beside the pillar. Yellow raincoat, hood pushed back. Purple boots that didn’t reach the ground. She said it the way you’d tell someone their shoelace was undone. Just information.
“It is,” I agreed.
She considered this, then hauled a small backpack off the seat beside her and onto her lap. “This bit’s mostly dry.”
Her mother, on her other side, looked up from a paper cup of tea and gave me a small nod. Permission, or apology, or both.
I sat. The bench was cold through my jeans and only a little wet, as promised. I pulled my suitcase in, out of the drip.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“North. For work.” a half truth but not the whole story. “You?”
“My aunt’s. Her dog steals toast.” Her boots swung beneath the bench, tapping the pillar on every backswing. “Off your plate. While you’re still eating it” she added.
“That’s bold.”
“He’s very bold,” she said, with real respect.
Then she pulled out a notebook, its pages soft at the corners, crumbs from some earlier snack tucked into the spine. She uncapped a felt-tip pen and drew the bench first, a long brown rectangle. Then her mother. Then herself, coloured entirely yellow, pressing so hard the pen squeaked.
Then she looked at me, and frowned.
“Your hair is difficult.”
I touched it. The humidity had done what humidity does. “It’s having a hard morning.”
“I’m doing it in scribbles.” And she did, a dark storm above a small round face. She gave me my suitcase too, with blue lines falling on it.
“Sorry,” her mother murmured, not looking especially sorry.
“No,” I said. “It’s accurate.”
I watched her add a cup to my hand. My terrible coffee, immortalised.
This interaction with the sweet girl bursting of sunshine reminded me of the Little Miss Sunshine movie. And I remembered how that movie wants to show that the happiest moment is the one where there is an acceptance everything despite the hard moments we experience.
I had spent the morning folded inward, the kind of tired where you stop expecting anyone to look at you properly. I become a luggage. Something to step around. And now here I was on a page, wedged between two strangers on a bench, my hair and my mood rendered honestly in purple-black ink.
It didn’t fix anything. The message was still unfinished. The thing I couldn’t say to my sister was still sitting in my chest. But there’s a difference between being distracted from your worries and having company while you hold them. For a few minutes, I had the second kind.
The board stopped flickering. The train slid in, windows fogged, brakes sighing.
Their carriage was further down. The girl tucked the notebook under her arm, waved once with her whole hand, and followed her mother into the crowd. We never traded names.
I found my seat and took out my phone. The cursor was still blinking after when I left it there.
Somewhere a few carriages ahead, a girl in a yellow raincoat was probably colouring in the rain. And on a crumb-dusted page, a woman with difficult hair was sitting on a bench, not entirely alone.