La Fusion

Lyrics

The seat is cold vinyl. Eight fifteen in the morning. The press of a stranger's wool coat against my arm. A neutral space. For a moment.

Your knee is a stone, just beside mine.
Your hands are folded, but the knuckles are white.
I can feel the engine of you, idling too fast.
A tremor through the seat.
A jaw muscle, clenched.
You are reading the advertisements for dentists and cheap holidays.
But you are not seeing them.

And now your weather is my weather.
Your low pressure system is moving in.
I did not open a window.
I did not ask for your rain.
It is a fusion, unwelcome.
This anxiety, it is not mine.
But it is in me.

My own breath is suddenly shallow.
A copy of a copy.
My shoulders have pulled up toward my ears, mirroring yours.
This is how it happens, I think.
The mirror neurons fire in the dark.
A wire crosses.
Your panic has found a second home in my chest.
My heart is beating in your rhythm now.

Because your weather is now my weather.
Your low pressure system is moving in.
I did not open a window.
I did not ask for your rain.
It is a fusion, unwelcome.
This anxiety, it is not mine.
But it is in me.

Elaine Hatfield wrote it down in a book in 1994.
A contagion of the spirit.
But here on the train, there are no footnotes.
Just the faint smell of your fear, like ozone before a storm.
An infection by proximity.
Did your pupils dilate? 
Did mine answer?

The doors hiss open at Châtelet.
You stand up.
You do not look at me.
You are gone into the crowd.
But the ghost of your hurry remains.
The train moves on.
And I am left with the echo of your trembling.
I am left wearing your coat of nerves.