Twenty years ago on a pleasant summer day, I rode the Muni to Ocean Beach. The train car was crowded, as I recall, filled with shuffling, busy people, shoving and pushing for room, in each other’s space, showing little regard for their fellow passengers. Thinking back, it’s hard to recall exactly where she got on the train, but I think it was at Duboce and Noe. 

Honestly, it could have been a stop earlier. The details are a little hazy.

Whichever stop it was, she wound up sitting across from me and down a few seats toward the back. After settling into her seat, she opened a paperback. Other commuters stood around her, clutching the rubber stirrups hanging from the grab bars overhead. They swayed in unison as the train clacked into motion. 

In this part of town, the Muni cars were above ground electric rail. They looked like a city bus, only powered by webs of electric cables suspended above the street.  It was like something out of the 1930s—a rattling, nostalgic kind of transit, all electric hums and cable whines, clacking sparks and rumbling noise. 

I was a young man at the time, and although I was sensitive, I would hardly call myself a romantic. Yet when I looked at this girl, who was reading as the Muni bumped and slammed its way across the well-worn track leading to the beach, I felt something stirring inside me I’d never felt before. 

The San Francisco sun was shining through the train’s cracked window over her shoulders, backlighting her dark curls, which hung just past her shoulders. Her brown eyes scanned the pages of her book, lips closed in a content, natural purse. Yet try as I might, I can’t remember what she was wearing. I guess it didn’t matter much to me at the time. I just remember her presence. Her being.  She looked like someone I wanted to know—intimately, if possible. And in that moment, I found myself wondering if it were possible to fall in love with a stranger. 

Okay, maybe not real love. That takes time. But was there some kind of cosmic thing that occurs when two strangers catch eyes for the first time and just know, in some metaphysical sense, that they have a connection?

I studied her face. Her slightly upturned nose. Her black, arched brows. And as I was marveling at her features, she looked up.

She gave me one of those smiles. You know the one I mean. 

Like she knew I was watching her and didn’t mind one bit. I felt my heart skip a beat—I was caught, but not in trouble. She seemed to be acknowledging that I wasn’t alone in feeling something in that moment. And that was all I was prepared to deal with, really, because I was young and had little experience with women. I didn’t have what it took to seriously approach someone like her. What would I even say?  

We looked into one another’s eyes for a fleeting second, but it felt so much longer to me—an eternity seemed to pass in that quiet gaze. And then she returned her attention to her book, brushing a curl from her face and smiling.  Maybe to say “I know. I feel it too.” 

A stop or two later, she stood up and left the car. Our eyes met a final time as she stepped off, and I could sense that something important had passed between us on that brief ride. We would never see each other again. I think we both knew it. But there was something there, however brief, that was special. A secret, maybe. Something unspoken, to keep forever.

An entire possible future. Two perfect strangers, an unusual spark. And in the end, a path closed off, a fork in the road closed and never to be reopened. 

And it was true: we never saw each other again. It’s been so long now that if she walked in this room and dumped a bucket of ice on my head, I doubt I’d recognize her. Yet, in my mind’s eye, I can still see her as she was all those years ago, sharing the awkward interest young people do when they notice each other but don’t have the nerve to speak. 

But the strange part isn’t just that I saw an attractive woman on public transit two decades ago. It’s that I still think about her today, in quiet moments of reflection, when I look back on my life and all the things that almost happened, yet, for one reason or another, didn’t. I believe she lives in my mind all these years later because she represents so much more than the most beautiful stranger I ever saw. 

She is a manifestation of all the questions we ask ourselves when we look back at our pasts. What if I had crossed the Muni car and sat next to her? What if we spoke? What if we became lovers, partners, or even long-term spouses? What if one day we had children? What would they be like?

Or, maybe just as likely, what would have happened if we’d merely become friends with an unrealized romantic connection? Hooked up a few times? Maybe slept with each other’s roommates, broken each other’s hearts, cried, screamed, deleted each other’s numbers, run into each other five years later in Berkely and pretended things were fine?

What if we invited each other to our weddings to other people, shared looks from the altar, punched mirrors in the bathroom, went home in tears? What if we entered and exited tumultuous relationships knowing the person we wanted most was forever out of reach, it hadn’t worked, and the failure had derailed our lives permanently? 

Because, you understand, all these things happened anyway. Either to me, or to her, or maybe to you. But in this reality, they didn’t happen between us—her and me, that is. So these possible futures and pasts are unknowable, although they continue to haunt and fascinate me in the silent moments of my life.  

Today, my life is solid. I am an adult. I have a marriage, a mortgage, and a mission (to pay for the first two). And what I’ve learned is this: when you reach a certain age, you stop seeing what your future could be and start looking back in time to wonder what could have been. 

Not because anything is wrong with today. But because yesterday anything was possible.

Where is the girl from the train now? I have no way of knowing. I hope she is happy, busy, and exhausted with her wonderful life. 

But for all I know she’s dead. Or wanted by the FBI. 

Several years ago, I came across a short clip from an obscure Japanese film, looped in a gif animation. It depicts a young woman on a train traveling along the seaside. The wind from the cracked window is blowing through her hair, and outside the sunlight shimmers on the endless blue ocean.

Although you can’t see her face, this woman reminds me of the girl on the train from all those years ago. She just feels like her. The image reminds me of the time I wondered about love at first sight, only to watch it step out of my life forever a few stops short of Ocean Beach.

I keep that clip of the woman on the train close. I look at it sometimes when I’m by myself. Not just to remember the girl from twenty years ago, but more to think about everything that could have been. 

Because in this life, I’ll never know for sure. 

But who knows? 

Maybe in the next.