Wool Coat on a Toronto Rush-Hour Subway

Six stops. She had counted them before she boarded at Woodbine, the way she counted line items before a board presentation. Six stops to St. George, then the walk, then the elevator, then her desk — a sequence she could manage. She stood near the centre doors with her hand around the overhead bar, her wool coat buttoned from collar to knee, her face arranged into the expression she wore in meetings when someone was wrong but not yet worth correcting.

The car was full. A man in a parka pressed against her left shoulder. A woman with a rolling suitcase occupied the space to her right. Neither of them could see anything. This was the fact she had returned to, again and again, since Broadview.

Five stops.

The third setting had come on between stations, the cycle she'd set that morning with the specific, deliberate calm of someone adjusting a thermostat. She had not anticipated that standing would change the geometry of it. Sitting at her kitchen table it had been manageable, a low persistent hum she could acknowledge and set aside. Standing, with the weight of the coat pressing down and her thighs held together by the simple fact of the crowd around her, it was something else. The pressure had nowhere to go. It stayed.

She breathed in through her nose. Held it for two counts. Released it — and the exhale came out fractionally longer than she'd intended, a length she felt in her sternum before she heard it.

She adjusted her grip on the overhead bar. Her left hand was the one holding it, the cold metal a thin wire of sensation against her palm. Her right hand hung at her side inside the coat pocket, fingers loose around nothing, because if she closed them around anything she didn't trust what the rest of her would do.

Four stops.

The coat was heavy. That was the word for it — not warm, not structured, but heavy, its weight distributed across her shoulders and pressing the fabric of her skirt flat against the tops of her thighs. She was aware of that pressure the way she was aware of her own pulse: constantly, and with the specific irritation of something she could not turn off by deciding to.

The train slowed into Pape. The doors opened. Cold air moved through the car, a brief blade of it against the back of her neck where her hair was pinned up, and she felt the contrast sharply — the cold at her nape, the heat that had been building, quietly and without her permission, somewhere considerably lower.

She did not shift her weight. She did not cross her ankles. She watched the doors.

Three stops.

The sound of the car settled back into its rhythm, and so did the third setting, and she stood there in her charcoal coat among strangers, her face entirely professional, and counted.