Doors

…first published in The Nelligan Review, June 2026…

…hiss open and the morning spills in cold and bright and I’m stepping in stepping in stepping into the metal belly of it all where everyone is already going somewhere already becoming already half-lost in the hum and the roll and the endless forward push of wheels on rail like a heartbeat that doesn’t belong to any one of us

and there’s the man with the briefcase not even a briefcase really just a box of obligations swinging low at his side like gravity made personal his tie crooked like he meant to fix it and forgot or didn’t care or cared too much and let it be crooked on purpose because perfection is another kind of weight

and the woman with the quiet eyes and the headphones sealed in her own private weather tapping her fingers soft soft soft like she’s counting invisible raindrops or remembering a song that never ends and her reflection floats over the window over the blur of trees and wires and fences and it’s hard to tell where she begins and the outside dissolves

and the kid kicking the seat not out of rebellion but out of overflow too much life in too small a body and the parent beside them holding the line holding the world together with a tired hand and a patience that’s been used before and will be used again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

and the couple leaning together not speaking much because speech is unnecessary when proximity says everything their shoulders aligned like twin rivers finding the same delta their silence not empty but full of shared things unspoken things understood without naming

and the older man with the paper unfolding time itself page by page steady as a ritual like each headline is a checkpoint on a road he’s walked before and will walk again and again and again until the ink runs out or the breath does

and the phones glow everywhere little suns in laps and hands and everyone orbiting them bent slightly forward like pilgrims toward a quiet altar of scrolling and tapping and refreshing as if something essential might appear if only the timing is right

and the train keeps moving keeps humming keeps reminding us we are not fixed points but passengers in a long chain of arrivals and departures brief encounters in a corridor of motion where faces appear and vanish like stations that only exist when we pass through them

and outside the world streaks by in fragments—parking lots, brick walls, leafless branches, a lone figure standing still as if they’ve opted out of the speed entirely—while inside we carry our invisible loads our thoughts looping and branching and returning like restless birds that never quite land

and someone laughs sudden bright and it breaks the hush for a second then folds back into the fabric of the car like it was always there and always will be like everything here is temporary but also repeating in cycles that don’t end