A young man swallowed the stairs and stop a few steps from me, waiting for the next metro. His hair were an unusual hue of blond, cut short on the sides and slightly longer and higher in the middle. He had a weird thing in his hand and extremely loud music came from his mobile phone. He looked like a simplified version of a punk, his behaviour loud and annoying to many, as if to compensate the lack of shocking features in his outfit. Around him, the desert. Nobody seemed the least interested by this somewhat anachronistic figure in a city where half the population wore suit and tie or its female version, and the other half were equally split between semi-naked teens showing different degrees of flesh, gym suits in every shape, colour and use and the everlasting jeans, which was always a safe choice for the middle-aged people having the day off and the elderly, who were eager to hide they were approaching the wrong side of the seventy. Any scent of unruly feeling that little young punkish boy might have wished to express was lost on such a conventional crowd, whose headset blasting music in their ears, blocked any annoyance people like him might cause. Eyes fixed on their mobile screen, nobody even glimpsed at him. I felt so bad for him, that I started staring to give his poise some credit. I slowly scanned his head, then his face, his hands. He had nice hands, with long fingers and, strangely no jewels. The music from his phone was as loud as before, rumbling wildly in the enclosed narrow space of the platform. My eyes shifted back to his face and met his. Blue, and red, and angry. There were though no sign of intoxication, and the red pupil were more likely to be caused by conjunctivitis, maybe due to contact lenses. The idea of a rebel wearing contact lenses to see better the shitty world we live in, made me smile and I felt my lips stretching before I could even realize I had such thought. Suddenly I felt like a stone hitting my nose, a crack reached my ear the same time blood started running down my chin. If I uttered any word of pain, it must have been softly because there was no reaction around me. Before I could regain my posture I heard the train stopping at the station and passengers getting off and on. I could not recover from the shock yet, and I kept holding my bloody nose with both hands, but the stale air of the dirty station covered the acrid smell of blood, which by then created a small pool at my feet. My dark winter jacket did not make the blood visible on my body and I could have been taken for a drunken, instead of someone in need of help. With a trembling hand, still short of breath, I tried to take the phone out of my pocket. Only then, my hand coated in flashy red blood, a girl who came to sit on my same bank realized I was injured. She called for help and a small crowd, which grew by the minute, gathered around me. Soon after, I was taken away to the hospital, where a broken nose was officially diagnosed. How weird, to be aggressed just because I was looking at someone. With a little sadness I thought about how we lost the capacity to look at each other without taking offence or feeling attacked. That punkish boy will never know the thrill of meeting the eyes of a girl and feel that she is the one.

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