On making contact

I'm on the train, phone in hand. The carriage is full but somehow also empty. The person opposite me is on FaceTime, half-present, their gaze moving between the screen and the middle distance. The person at the ticket office serves me whilst scrolling - and I notice, as they do, that I'm doing exactly the same thing. We are both somewhere else. I wonder about these passing moments - these brief, unremarkable contacts between strangers - and what happens to them when attention is already somewhere else. Including mine.