It’s 6:50 at night and I’m standing behind the black tiles that delimitate where you can start standing on the Deportivo train station to wait for the train to arrive. This one train passes by with its light off and faster than usual. Since I was standing so close to the train tracks, I felt that the wind the train produced pushed me. Everyone got nearer to the black tiles to board the train but they just had realized that that wasn’t going to be our ride.
Finally, at 6:56 our ride arrived at el Deportivo, there was only one person sitting on the wagon until the thirty persons that were waiting with me got to sit down in any of the other available seats. A woman screams excitedly as she notices someone she knows sitting at the other side of the wagon and goes to sit right next to him, and whoever he was with, to have a small talk conversation, because she was about to get off on the next stop.
At the Torrimar station, a woman sits behind me and her vanilla scent perfume brings back some of my best childhood memories… There’s also a couple of girls sitting someplace behind me talking very loudly to each other, it almost feels as if they were yelling in my ear. If you switch the vanilla scent woman and the loud couple of girls I could still probably smell the vanilla and the girls wouldn’t be yelling in my ear, they would be screeching in it.
A crowd boards the train, especially my wagon, at the Martinez Nadal station. There are a lot of mixed scents and smells, something not very pleasant for my nostrils. I can hear an iPhone ringtone through the chattering. For it to be a seven o’clock train ride it feels and sounds as it were rush hour.
Sitting diagonally to me, there’s father comforting his teenage son, who seems to be struggling about something, he’s pretty sad. They got off on the stop following the one they boarded. In front of them was a woman staring me down. I wondered if she knew that I just typed about her…
Seriously, I feel like I’m in a mall food court. Suddenly, all of the chatter calms down, but still, the man on the row next to me keeps laughing with his irritating laugh. The woman in front of me is too involved with her iPhone 6plus to notice -or even hear- whatever it is that is happening on this train wagon.
Centro Médico: the platform where people switch trains because they usually coincide at this stop. I particularly hate the Centro Médico to Cupey ride section because of the loud noise the train does when taking the curve; because whatever that is that needs oiling hasn’t been receiving the proper maintenance.
I check the time and it’s 7:10 p.m. I look back and there’s two guys sitting right next to each other and they definitely haven’t acknowledged each other’s presence.
The Rio Piedras stop: everyone loses their phone signal and wonder about what they are going to do with their lives for the next 40 seconds, which is what it takes to get out of Rio Piedras and to the Universidad stop.
Next stop is my stop. The train stopped. The train doors are about to open…