feeling listless

History From: Diary. 22 May 1994. "It's happened to everyone. You're sitting on a train (I'm returning to University - but I don't think that matters), opposite someone who you would love to be friends with. And you find yourself thinking up how to break the ice -- the questions you want to ask. What is your name? Where are you from? Are you a student to? If so, what course are you doing?

This unwritten questionaire spins through your mind, as find yourself desparately trying not to stare, but finding yourself transfixed. Your eyes begin to trace them, like a pencil. The way they sit -- what they're wearing -- you take a photograph and place it on the walls of your memory.

Out of the window, the scenery glides past. Should you comment? After all, it is beautiful. What is it about them in particular, that draws you in so? Is it the unknowning? The Mystery? That you find yourself imagining what they are like -- how they talk, their personality, their life?

You feel inadequate -- in another place and time you feel like could chat to them -- become friends. But it is as though, here and now, sitting on this train, thinking these thoughts, that the table upon which your coke cans clang together, is a barrier between a possibility and a fleeting thought.