On Passing
- Publication: Alchemy
- Year: 2025
- Author or artist: Rahim Welch-Lucier (Alchemy Editor)
- Type: Non-fiction
I pass people I recognize on the train sometimes.
I’m never sure how to feel about that. I knew you a lifetime ago; we chatted last week. It’s a selfish kind of love to know someone only in that way.
I’ve never met you, but for a single moment in January, our eyes met and you waved right before I could look away.
I never learned your name, but we’ve passed each other hundreds of times.
The sun sets differently on the train. I think it’s because you don’t choose it.
Everywhere else travel is a constant process of choices. There, on the train there’s nowhere to reach, and no way to get there faster. We’re already in motion. I wake up, and I run out the door to get to work. I can taste the urgency in the morning air of the city. I swap breath for the exhaust of a car that carries a person as jittery as me.
People hate ‘sonder’ now, and it makes me sad.
For someone who has just reached a newfound understanding of everyone else’s lives, it seems cruel for that same ‘everyone else’ to pretend this newfound glowing world were something dull and ordinary.
I wonder if anyone can see the irony in that, to find cliche in understanding.
To pretend that it’s effortless to see everyone else with clarity, and that it’s simple implies a staggering misunderstanding, I think.
I hope that I’m wrong.
I think about it on the train, and it hurts my heart.
It’s not just that other people exist—that’s obvious. No one has time for a realization like that.
It’s that they want and hurt, just like you do. They can roar by in an instant, and you’ll never learn their name. Countless libraries of knowledge live and breathe on the same train as you. Someone is living an adventure you might’ve yearned for, but you will never talk to them.
You’re trying to get somewhere, after all.
As we go we forget each other more and more. I don’t remember your face.
Maybe that’s why the sun sets differently on the train.
The world breaks into colors you’ve never seen before, and you pause.
Here aboard the train my heart glows and aches. The sky is alight with shades of morning and noon, even as night presses its palm over my eyes. In front of me, another person watches the evening sky with the same passing joy.
We share a moment together, and they never see my face.
Sometimes sadness is only profound to oneself. I look up to the night sky in the city some days, and I wish tears would come. I wish someone could express the ways that the light bounces off the clouds and makes the city glow. I try to capture it in the moment but you can’t take a photo of a moment. It passes too quickly. The blues and pinks of a long gone sky were left on the tracks behind.
I cannot show someone the way the street smelled when I saw that glowing sunset.
I cannot tell you how big the moon was the night it shined over the city in a haunting orange.
Photos serve an ill substitute for memories, and for living. I forget what it’s like to exist in a time and place. I forget when I pick up the camera. I forget. photo or no.
I want to reach out to that person in front of me.
I want to ask them how they see the night sky, to know what lives behind their eyes. I want to hold a photo of them in my hand, so I might not forget.
It would probably serve me well to stand from the train’s seat. But I won’t, and I didn’t, and I don’t.
The moment passes into my memories. Only a photo of clouds proves it wasn’t a dream, immaterial though they are.