Unobserved

When you live in a city you can never be alone. Maybe indoors, but not really. There's always someone upstairs or downstairs, next door or across the way who is always close by. In my case, there are seven other girls, SEVEN! in my flat. Alone doesn't happen very often. Outside... you're out of luck. If you do manage to find yourself alone, you're probably somewhere no sane person would want to be.
Tonight I found myself "alone" for a few minutes in the Goldhawk Rd. tube station. I put the word in quotation marks because you are never alone in a tube station or anywhere else in London for that matter. With CCTV, their video surveillance system, there's always someone watching.
Anyways, the train going the opposite direction I was going had departed, taking with it all the other separate souls who were previously keeping me company from the other side of the tracks. It was 9:00 on a Thursday night in a not-particularly-hopping part of London, so the people in the station were just individuals. Unattached. Like me. Still, though they didn't speak a word, they were there, observing. Everyone is an observer in a city.
Now before I arrived at station I had been whistling to myself, I was in a whistling mood, but before climbing the stairs up to the train tracks I had stopped so as to not annoy any of the silent observers on the other side. I'm not that great at whistling.
But then that train came, and then the train left, taking with it every other soul in the station. I found myself left alone, alone! on the platform. Suddenly I felt something, a relief from a pressure that I didn't even realize that I was under. I felt the joy of solitude, a kind of solitude I hadn't felt for months. The kind you don' get in the city.
You see, in the suburbs, where I have always lived, it's easy to access this solitude, and I did. Often. Or at my university. I love experiencing a public space that, in the daytime, is always populated, but, in the night time is deserted. It belongs only to me. In the same way I love a place that the general public generally visits in fair weather, but they abandon in the rain and cold leaving it just for me.
This is the feeling that suddenly came over me in the Goldhaw Rd tube station. I let out a whistle. A loud one. I whistled a tune. And then... I started to sing. Not word. I kind of sang-whistled, going doo-doo-doo to the tune in my head. To tell you the truth, I felt like dancing, but that security camera, though deaf, still had eyes somewhere behind it. Instead I paced to the music.
I guess this might not sound like much, humming and pacing, but I can't describe... it felt like much. It felt good. It felt like freedom. It was straight from the soul without any observers to judge. I filled the station with me. I was the only person to be that moment in the long history of that platform. It was all me, and all by myself. I don't know how long I was alone, but it could only have been a couple minutes. Soon a man with a cane emerged from the stairwell. I stopped whistling and pulled myself in so that I only filled a couple feet around me instead of the entire station. The man with the cane sat down and another person ambled in. And there you have it. It was so quick, but I had found something that I didn't know I had missed. I didn't even know it existed.
Now I'm sitting in another tube station, the one near my flat with seven other girls, and I'm writing this all down before the moment leaves me. trains arrive and depart. People pass around me. It's not normal to see a girl sitting writing in a notebook with no intention to move in such a temporary space as a tube station, but there you have it. I haven't since been alone again, and I know I'm being observed. I have the same song in my head, but G-d save me if it gets any further than that. Besides, it's about time to go home.

(Typed up from my notebook. I thought you might like to read it.)