cock-holliday:

A person on the train I still think about was this woman a few years backā€“pre COVID. Maybe mid-late twenties. She was holding a wrapped present so tightly to her chest and was blushing. She would put the present in her lap and look at it, touching the ribbon gently with her fingers, then would hold it to herself again, just smiling so brightly. It was such an intimate snapshot of a person. She was so happy and excited. Fidgety but not nervous. It was such a genuinely joyful moment this woman could barely contain in public, and it stuck with me all this time later. It makes me wonder what moments in my life stuck with someone else that I had no idea would be ingrained in their minds. My guess would be the time I ate shit on a patch of ice outside the 7/11 and had to go in and the cashier pretended not to have seen.