The train lurched forward, and I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the window, watching the platform dissolve into the grey blur of the city’s underbelly. It was a Thursday afternoon in late winter, and I was heading south on the Frankston line, past stations whose names I knew by heart but whose platforms I had rarely stood on. The carriage was half-empty, the air thick with the smell of damp coats and stale coffee. I was seventeen, or perhaps eighteen—the precise year blurs now—and I had just left an appointment with a university admissions tutor who had told me, with a certain clinical politeness, that my personal statement read like a script. He meant it as a compliment to its polish; I heard it as an accusation of its falseness. I turned my gaze outward, away from the fluorescent glare, and tried to lose myself in the motion.
The suburbs slid past: back fences, clotheslines, a football oval, a row of shops with awnings sagging under the weight of years. My reflection hovered faintly on the glass, a ghostly figure superimposed on the passing houses. I studied it—the shape of my jaw, the dark circles under my eyes, the way my hair fell across my forehead—and felt a strange dissonance. The person in the glass looked like me, performed the gestures I made, but she seemed to belong to a story I had been told rather than one I had lived. Every detail of my appearance had been curated: the jacket chosen for its message, the posture adopted to project confidence. Yet here, against the backdrop of strangers’ backyards, the performance felt exposed.
I remembered a conversation from the week before, in the school library, where a friend had asked why I always answered questions about my future with the same three talking points. I had laughed it off, but her question had lodged itself like a splinter. The talking points were not lies—I did volunteer at the hospital, I did want to study literature, I did believe in community—but they were selections, heavily edited highlights of a messier reality. The full story included the evenings I spent scrolling through social media, feeling envious of classmates whose achievements seemed effortless; the mornings I rehearsed casual remarks in front of the mirror; the guilt of knowing I valued perception over substance. Standing on that train, I saw my reflection and recognised it as a montage of approved scenes.
The person in the glass looked like me, performed the gestures I made, but she seemed to belong to a story I had been told rather than one I had lived.
The train slowed as it approached a station, and the reflection sharpened against the dark of a tunnel. For a moment, I was trapped between two images: the face on the glass and the landscape racing behind it. Neither felt entirely real. I thought about the admissions tutor’s comment—a script—and realised he had not meant the writing was insincere, but that it lacked the texture of genuine uncertainty. I had smoothed away every rough edge, every contradiction, until the narrative read as inevitable. But growth is not inevitable. It is full of dead ends and strange detours, decisions made for reasons we only half-understand. My reflection offered no clues; it simply stared back, a placid surface.
I pulled out the book I had been carrying—a collection of essays on memory and identity—and tried to read, but the words dissolved into the rhythm of the tracks. A child in the seat across the aisle was pressing her own reflection, making faces at herself. Her mother smiled, indulgent. The child’s game was pure: she saw no distinction between the self and the reflection, only delight in the discovery of likeness. When had I lost that? When had my reflection become something to manage rather than to greet? I envied her simplicity, even as I knew that the simplicity was a luxury of her age. My own adolescence had been a long apprenticeship in self-consciousness, and the train window now showed me its diploma.
The train emerged from the tunnel, and the reflection thinned again, overtaken by the bright afternoon. I thought about the essay I had read the night before, by a writer who argued that identity is not something we find but something we negotiate—with ourselves, with others, with the expectations of the spaces we occupy. The train was one such space: a moving room where I was both observer and observed, present and absent. My reflection was not a lie; it was a version, a draft continually revised. The discomfort I felt was not because I was fake, but because I had forgotten that the process of revision was ongoing. I had mistaken a static image for a finished self.
By the time the train reached my station, the light had shifted, and the reflection was gone. I stepped onto the platform, the cold air waking my skin. The writer’s voice still echoed, but so did the child’s laughter. I walked home along the main road, past the same shops I always passed, but I looked at them differently—not as backdrops to my performance, but as places with their own histories, indifferent to mine. The train window had not given me an answer. It had given me a question, one I would carry for years: What would it mean to see my reflection without trying to arrange it first? I did not know, but I was willing to find out.