The One and Only

On the night train ride home, the voice of Accusefive’s front woman was flowing from my AirPods to the rarefied and murky air of peak hours. Perfume, shampoo, hand cream, tobacco, a mixture of passengers’ body smells diffused in the lyrics and made me feel a little dizzy. “I love you so, that I’m tongue tied to utter”. This is the band’s hit song *The One and Only*. I’d been looping it for a while now. It began to crescendo as I carelessly glanced around the car.

My eyes caught a punk woman dressed in black leather jacket and Sex Pistols shirt to my left. She was swiping on Tinder, silver ringed fingers flitting agilely like butterflies on the sequence of adeptly-posed males, but the glacial expression on her face belied the odds that any butterflies would ever find the route into her heart was infinitely approaching zero. Her dried crimson lips clamped tightly together, dark-shadowed eyes stared absent-mindedly onto the screen, and the long curly eyelashes rarely fluttered at anyone.

On the right, a young couple were snuggling in the most unstable posture on a moving train, mumbling to each other in a language only those in love would register. Their bodies locked together, no leaning on the doors, and their hands were too preoccupied with rubbing each other’s skin to grab the handles. It was as if their attachment was tenable enough to stand on its own, but the reality would not grant that. Every time the train jerked to a stop, the dyad wobbled more violently than any other passengers. Still they insisted, as if the thirty minutes’ ride was the last intimacy they could indulge in.

In front of me, a short girl at her twenties wearing the most unadorned clothes was holding her phone up to squeeze its way through the crowdedness. Her screen almost pressed itself onto my face, and there she opened the texting interface with a user whose alias she had set as “honey”. She punched on the keyboard, “Don’t treat someone like this who would accompany you for a walk at a windy winter midnight. You wouldn’t find another one.” In the forty minutes of our shared ride, she kept fidgeting agitatedly with her phone, waiting for a reply that may never come.

Then it was me, who just ended a short-lived Tinder-initiated relationship, which, though short, was fervid and intense, and even lasted into a long-distance phase with fifteen hours’ time difference. And ironically enough, it also suddenly snapped when he stopped replying to my message. I almost felt like I had trespassed upon a movie set on the train where the punk woman, the young couple and the petite girl were acting the exact life I had experienced. But then I realized, for all entangled in the complexity of romance, the start and demise of a relationship were almost always the same.

My mind was still wandering in the labyrinth of human relationships when a vague train announcement emerged from the female voice in my AirPods. I missed my destination.

I got off at the next station, and took the train of the opposite direction to turn back. I shook my head to expel the revived negative feelings, took a deep breath of the crisp winter air, and remembered there was a well-known movie director in China who once said, “I rarely tried to depict life in my movie. Instead, I picture love, because when love is construed, so is life.”

If that was the case, that night on the train, I thought my answer to life was a bit more clearer.