To See Things Clearly
Having a cry on my daily commute, I love love... <3
This week, I don’t want to talk about me.
I mean - I will, inevitably, end up talking about me. I loathe not being the centre of attention, especially when it’s my pen orchestrating the narrative. If I’m the one telling the story, it stands to reason that I should also be the most interesting part of it. That’s just maths.
(I’m famously quite bad at maths).
But this story isn’t really about me. And I’m - actually - perfectly okay with that.
This is a story about something I saw. Or rather, something I felt, so deeply and so instantaneously, that it lodged itself in my ribcage and hasn’t moved since. The memory welded itself to the spindly, grasping fingers of my veins - a moment as fleeting as it was unforgettable.
I don’t know the names of the people this is about. I don’t know where they’re from, or what they do for work. I don’t know their stories. But I saw them - just for a moment, just once - and they saw each other in a way that I haven’t stopped thinking about since.
It was Thursday after work.
I’d had approximately three hours of sleep the night before, having failed to locate a spider I’d spotted in my bedroom after its initial sighting. I saw it, I screamed, it vanished - and I, naturally, could not rest until I either found it or died trying.
In the morning, I had a semi-important meeting - the kind where you’re expected to be polished and articulate and vaguely competent. The kind where your blazer’s not meant to be wrinkled and your sentences aren’t meant to collapse in on themselves like a dying star.
Naturally, I opened my mouth and tripped over the first three words of my own presentation. Tried to recover. Fumbled again. And in an act of pure, feral panic, I accidentally let slip a quiet but unmistakable “shit”.
My face volcanic and it stayed that way for the entire meeting - heat pulsing beneath my skin, like my body was trying to cauterise the memory in real time.
And, as if the universe hadn’t quite finished with me: I got my period during my lunch break. Which, you know, sort of speaks for itself.
Still, in the afternoon I dragged my body to the gym. It’s directly across the street from my office, and I am nothing if not devoted to the illusion of discipline. (Also: I have to justify the direct debit. Also: I’m going to Spain this week and I want my butt to look bigger. That’s me being fiscally responsible. That’s growth-adjacent logic.)
I managed exactly fourteen minutes on the Stairmaster. That’s it. Fourteen minutes total at the gym and then I gave up. Blamed the spider. Blamed a bad workday. Blamed my period, the current geopolitical climate, anything but my own choices.
Bone-tired and bruised by the day, I wandered toward Tottenham Court Road to catch the tube home.
Now, there’s something particularly grim about heading home after work on a Thursday night in London.
It’s not quite the weekend - you can almost smell it, but you’re not there yet. And the week has already wrung you out like a dishcloth. The city feels over it. The air smells like fried oil and pollution. Your feet hurt. Your bag’s heavy. You forgot to defrost the chicken in your freezer - again.
Everyone else seems to be out drinking, of course. They always are. That’s one of the beauties of London: everyone is always down for a good time. They line the streets in little clusters, spilling out of pubs and wine bars, pint glasses sweating in their hands. If the sun’s out, it’s even worse. Everyone’s laughing too loudly, squinting into the glow.
And if you’re not part of it - if you’re just there, moving through it - the whole thing feels kind of punishing. Like the city is doing joy loudly and on purpose, just to remind you that you’re not.
Alone, I made my way down, down, down to the train platform.
On evenings like this one, I try to remind myself how lucky I am - to live here in this city, to have a job to be tired from, to be healthy enough to get bored of the commute. I try to be grateful. Some days it lands. Other days, it slides off me like water off grease.
That night, it was slipping.
And then I saw her.
She couldn’t have been older than forty. Pale blonde hair caught the overhead light like wire spun gold. A long navy coat skimmed the tops of her boots. There was something quietly elegant about her. Composed. Self-contained.
She stood near the back wall, tapping her cane in soft, rhythmic strokes, as if feeling the shape of the space through sound.
She didn’t look distressed - not in the way we’re trained to interpret distress, anyway - but something in me paused. That flicker of concern, or curiosity, or guilt pretending to be compassion. I wasn’t sure.
She was blind. And she was alone.
I hovered awkwardly a few steps away, stuck in that painfully modern kind of paralysis: Should I offer help? Would that be patronising? What if she’s perfectly fine and I make it weird? What if I’m the weird one? What if she’s waiting for someone?
So I did nothing. Just stood there, marinating in my own indecision, half-concerned and half self-conscious - the world's most useless good samaritan.
I kept thinking about what it must feel like to stand there, in that space. To exist, unseeing, in a space like that. The screeching of the trains. The gusts of metallic heat that rush through before a carriage arrives. The vague soup of smells: sweat and deodorant, cologne and coffee, wet newspaper, stale beer, something vaguely burning. The robotic announcements crackling overhead, always half-a-beat too loud.
And the sounds of people - all those private lives murmuring into a single, low hum. Phones pinging. Laughter ricocheting. Soles slapping against tiles. A couple bickering softly behind me, the way people do when they think no one’s listening.
It was entirely overwhelming. And I could see.
I have the privilege of sight - of reading signs and scanning crowds and recognising the shape of the world before it touches me. And even with that advantage, I felt claustrophobic. The noise. The heat. The press of strangers.
I couldn’t even begin to imagine her world, let alone how she was planning to board the train.
I stood there, trying not to stare (not that she would know I was staring, I told myself, a little mortified to have even thought it), unsure what to do with my limbs. The image of this woman - alone, calm, anchored in the noise - looping on repeat in my mind. Something about her steadiness, her quiet certainty in such a disorienting place, made my chest ache.
And then he appeared.
A man - maybe late forties. Short. Bald. Dressed in a button-up and navy slacks, the kind of outfit that suggests a steady job and a preference for structure. Polished oxfords. No nonsense. Not flashy. He didn’t rush, didn’t call out, didn’t startle her. He just walked - deliberately, calmly - towards her.
I watched as she smiled.
Not a polite smile. Not the kind you give a stranger who offers you their seat on the train. A real smile. The kind that starts somewhere deep in your chest, climbs its way up your throat, and lands in your cheeks like sunlight.
She knew he was there.
She didn’t need to see him. She felt him - by sound, by presence, by whatever invisible thread ties you to your person in a crowd. It was like her whole body recognised him before her mind had a chance to name it.
I was absolutely fucking enthralled.
He smiled in return, eyes soft, face open. He said something to her - quiet, low, lost to me in the wind tunnel rush of the station. And then, so gently it made my throat tighten, he cupped her face in both hands. Reverently, like she was something sacred. Something rare.
He kissed her, and they both smiled through it. Teeth pressed together, grinning into each other’s skin. Like the kiss was secondary to the happiness of simply being near each other again. Holding one another after a long day apart.
Then they laced their fingers together - the kind of interlocking that doesn’t require practice because it’s been done a thousand times. Muscle memory. Love made tactile. He said something else. Another quiet nothing, meant only for her. And she laughed - head tilted back, full and free.
Then, with a gentle tug of their joined hands, he led her onto the train. They stepped forward together, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Because for them, it probably was.
It was so simple. So human. And yet it cracked something wide open in me.
Because I have never seen someone look at another person the way he looked at her.
Not just with affection. Not just with fondness. With certainty. With devotion. With this quiet, unwavering clarity that didn’t need to announce itself to be real. There was no performance in it. No pretence. Just presence. Just love - full-bodied and unashamed.
And the extraordinary part?
She couldn’t even see it.
She couldn’t see the way he looked at her like she was the only thing in the station - on the planet - that mattered. Couldn’t see the softness in his expression, the subtle awe, the way his entire face changed just by being near her.
And what floored me - what absolutely gutted me - is that she didn’t need to.
She didn’t need to see it to know it.
Because love, the good kind, the steady kind, doesn’t always come with spectacle. Sometimes, it’s something you recognise by feel. By weight. By the way someone shows up, day after day, like it’s the easiest decision they’ve ever made.
I stood there on the platform, surrounded by hundreds of commuters, and I cried.
Not a graceful, windswept tear. Not the kind you could brush away and pretend never happened.
No. I sobbed, actually. Like a baby. A whole-body, lump-in-throat, eyes-burning kind of cry. The kind you feel deep in your stomach.
Their train disappeared into the tunnel and I was left blinking at the space where they had just been, like I’d witnessed something almost religious, like I was waiting for something sacred to echo back.
I keep thinking about them.
About the way he saw her - not just physically, not just as someone to be helped or held, but truly saw her. Not as someone blind. Not as someone lacking. But as someone to be adored. As someone worthy. And how she received that love like it was hers by right. Like it was nothing new. Like it had always been there.
And then, inevitably, I thought about myself. (I did warn you).
About how often I miss what’s right in front of me. How often I misread love as uncertainty. How often I squint at affection, looking for cracks. Waiting for the catch. Distrusting kindness as if it’s a trick.
Bear with my very on-the-nose metaphor here, but, I think we rely too much on sight.
We chase what we can see. The texts. The dates. The declarations. The visible evidence. The camera-ready moments we can point to and say: See? This counts. But the best kinds of love - the most enduring kinds - aren’t always photogenic. They aren’t always loud. They’re quiet. Rooted. Sensory. Felt, not flaunted.
Maybe love - real love - lives in the places we don’t post.
Maybe love lives in the sound of someone’s voice calling your name like it’s a song. In the way their hand finds yours without looking. In presence. In patience. In knowing.
That couple reminded me that love doesn’t always look the way you expect it to.
Sometimes, it doesn’t look like anything.
But it feels like everything.
🤍