Quarantine

There is a perpetual sense of solitude that takes hold of you during the commute.  You’re surrounded by people but you feel oddly removed from everything around you.  They have nothing to do with you nor do you have anything to do with them.  Each person commutes within the comfortable confines of his or her own reality.  It is a world in which no others exist until the moment your solitude is shattered by the rogue reality of another.

The warning signs were there.  He had been sniffling for several minutes prior but was garnering nothing other than the occasional awkward glance.   The slight squint coupled with the thin layer of water accumulating in his eyes should have forewarned everyone but it was only the observant few who feverishly shuffled away in the tight crowd.   

Germs are the scourges of mankind.  If it is not humans who eventually cause our own demise it will be germs.  Those microscopic civilizations that wreak havoc on your body making you into a walking talking sneezing coughing vehicle in their unrelenting conquest of earth.  This microscopic enemy at our gates would soon burst forth in an all out assault on nearby passengers.  

The squint soon turned to a full furrow.  The man struggled to remove his hand from his pocket but to no avail.  You could almost hear the sound of individual realities crashing together as suddenly people were acutely aware that they were indeed around other people. I would imagine the most aware was the woman standing opposite him as she took the full force of the blow.  With monk-like focus she managed to retain her composure as if time would reverse and the incident would be avoided if she simply refused to acknowledge it, if she refused to leave her comfortably false reality.  She couldn’t though and when this realization came crashing down she let the expletives fly. 

Fallout from the sneeze wafted through the air as horrified passengers turned and covered their faces with anything they could find.  Parents seated at a safe distance covered the eyes of their children shielding them from the devastation.

When patient zero opened his eyes he met the sordid glare of the woman opposite him.  With the stunned yet mildly satisfied expression of someone who had just sneezed still on his face he began to fiddle in his pocket.  His clammy hand emerged grasping a key ring attached to which was a travel-sized bottle of hand-sanitizer.  Head down in apology he squeaked, “sorry” as he handed the woman his keys.  She waved him off and angrily pulled out her own sanitizer to begin the decontamination process.

Not one “god bless you” was uttered that day on the wonderfully mind-numbing monotony that is the daily commute.