I’ve been hanging around here for a while and yet I didn’t see him arrive; he seems to have appeared out of nowhere. By the time I notice him, he is sitting down, full and real. He has a Styrofoam cup of coffee in front of him and is stirring the contents absently with one of those little plastic sticks, performing the motion for much longer than is actually necessary to blend two liquids. He is staring straight ahead and moving the stick as if he finds the circular motion comforting, or as if he has forgotten he is doing it. Time turns.

At first, I assume he is a commuter getting a mid-morning train – a late start because he’s working in the evening, perhaps, or a special meeting called elsewhere. It’s the suit he is wearing: it just calls out office boy. I observe his stirring motion for a while. He lifts the little plastic stick from the coffee, gives it a neat, silent tap on the rim of the cup and lays it on the paper napkin on the table. This young man isn’t going anywhere, I think. When you’re waiting to get on a train, or for someone else to arrive on one – I am, after all, the world’s expert on people who are waiting for trains – you look at the board constantly. But not once, during the whole time I have been observing him, has this young man glanced at either the electronic display or the barriers.

I watch him as he doesn’t watch what is going on around him and think, this quality of his, of waiting for nothing, I know how that feels. I glide over, to take a closer look.