We were at 49th St. on an extremely crowded N train this morning when a young man walked up to the doors as they opened.

“Is this the N going to Queensborough?”

A man next to me shook his head and pointed the other way, ostensibly explaining that he’d have to go the other way. I decided to further elucidate his point by uttering, “You gotta get on the other side.”

The young man nodded, but very weirdly just went to a bench and sat back down. I was pretty bemused by this, and I looked at the guy who pointed and went, “he just sat back down again,” thinking it’d get a laugh.

Instead the guy looked at me liked I dropped an ice cream cone on his shoe and went:

“His life. His rules.”

I then felt very embarrassed, as I often do about everything. I’m sure this guy is gonna go to his office and complain that two strangers in a row talked to him on the train while he “tried to make heads or tails out of the Johnson Report” or something. But at the end of the day, I (hopefully) will not feel ashamed for passing along something I thought was peculiar to a person that was involved in the whole ordeal.

We got a guy waiting for something that will never come, asking for answers he doesn’t listen to. I then started thinking about how a lot of us are probably more like that guy than we’d like to think.

Eh, fuck it: Our life. Our rules.