Paradoxically a Woman

Hovering between the irrational and the valid, Pam really didn’t need a reason to despise the stranger sitting sloppily across from her. The wave of alarm beaming through her was something that immediately challenged her better senses. Indignantly snoring and wildly unkempt, the sloppy stranger happened to be occupying a very special seat on what Pam believed was a very special train. It was this particular train, this particular cart, and that particular seat where her mother had once envisioned intellectual realities that had transformed this cart into a shuttle of our highest thoughts.

Her mother was tirelessly brilliant, and if bright ideas had their scale along the revolutionary and the innovative, she and her army of thinkers could be seen maneuvering across either end. So Pam could only gasp at the sight of a shiftless man with an equally shiftless purpose occupying the very seat that had once brimmed with such incomparable energy and cerebral insight. Suddenly, and even Pam would hasten to add inexplicably, some uncanny sense of social responsibility compelled Pam to violently cough and sneeze in the man’s direction. The train dipped off course, and the man immediately woke up startled, the disquiet in his eyes hardly difficult to discern. Pam, feeling his growing glare upon her, looked to the ground obediently. She had not anticipated that he would actually notice her, and she did not at all want to spur a confrontation.

Karisma, a person Pam felt perfectly validated for leaving but a sister she ultimately loved to the irrational end, was never so accommodating. As though daring the man to initiate a response he doubtlessly would come to regret, Karisma decisively looked him in the eyes. After realizing that nothing but a hollow feeling could be sensed upon meeting her stare, the man simply slumped back into his seat, confused. Karisma threw Pam a wink that immediately put her at ease. It went without saying that she understood the causes behind Pam’s sudden allergic reaction.

Pam loved Karisma the same way the earth must love the sun to revolve around it every day. In the countenance of each other’s presence, they shared this critical intimacy for the train. But their romance for the train was quite distinct in its abstractness.

The many unknown souls who freelanced about the train, moonlighting as riders while living as thinkers, finding solace in the privacy of their own seats—this was the higher value of the subway experience to which Pam felt connected. Looking at a complete stranger engrossed in the still of self-reflection moved her closer to the human experience than did the platonic smile of a knowing acquaintance. These were the people, the only people, Pam felt, that should accompany her on the train.

Pam could neither name nor speculate as to what moved Karisma to ride the train with an intensity and force that never failed to rival her own. She only knew that, in some fundamental way, it could not be separated from that incautious stare she had just given the man. It would take time before Pam came to understand her sister’s peculiarities with the same power of rehearsal that she understood her mother’s philosophy. Yet, when trying to retrieve answers to simple question about her sister’s motivations, Pam was constantly met with a quaint array of shorthanded answers—answers Karisma seemed to have a monopoly on.

Karisma was not an open book, but to be sure, it was an open secret that she had little competition in the precociously gifted department. Yet she had dropped out of school and had never afforded anyone an explanation. She could break down and put back a computer without ever glancing at the manual. Yet she would never dare to break down and put back the pieces of her life. All in all, the fact that Karisma possessed an elite talent for abstract thinking common among the socially awkward and generally maladjusted only seemed to be further heightened by the reverse fact that she did not cower in confidence nor exhibit an inkling of social fear.