Trian stop this morning. I was walking up the stairs briskly until I almost ran into a woman taking each step very, very, very slowly. It sounded like she was talking to someone using one of those fancy hands-free phones. She had on a grey fur coat, so I assumed she had money enough to afford such a device.

After arriving at the top, I sidestep her and go to my usual spot to wait. Passing, I see she doesn't have a phone at all and has been muttering to herself this whole time. I watch her slow progress across the landing, and she rarely meets anyone's gaze. I was standing, along with a handful of others, facing the tracks. This woman passed in front of us two, three times, almost like a drill instructor. The whole time, talking to herself.

Immediately, I thought of the mother figure from Requiem for a Dream.

I watched her move to a bench. She sat down in between a young man and a young woman. Both were off in their own worlds, reading something or listening to their music. After about two minutes, the guy realized that the old lady in a fur coat has been talking to herself the whole time. He got up and left. Another minute later, the young woman realized and also left. The crazy woman in the old coat sat there alone. But when I looked, she wasn't talking anymore.

I wanted to take a picture of her. But immediately after that thought entered my head, I felt like crap for wanting to photograph someone just to highlight what I thought to be "problematic" with them. She appeared, in every visual sense, perfectly normal. What filled me with a great sadness was that everyone around her seemed to maintain this invisible distance.

What happens to people who somehow become distanced like that? Is it truly mental illness, or can a person slowly grow farther and farther away from where the rest of the world is? Can that continue until everyone else senses it, and keeps their distance?

I thought of homeless people, and how few of us talk to them. Small wonder some take to talking to themselves. It seems a testament to the strength of language, to our need to communicate... something. Anything. It's so powerful, we end up conversing with ourselves because no one else will.

On the train, I pulled out some poems and tried to look over things. Everyone around me was either reading a book, or listening to music. In a way, I guess my poems are notes to myself, a way for me to talk to myself. Authors were talking to the other passengers through their books, musicians were talking to others through songs.

Very few of us on that train, including me, including the crazy woman in the fur coat, were talking to one another.