One day in July, six months pregnant, I went to take a seat on the metro, swerved in front of a woman as the train lurched and began crying uncontrollably when she gave me a rude look.

Pregnancy was not emotionally pleasant for me. Carrying two babies comes with the added joy of carrying double the pregnancy hormones, which for me meant, mostly, that I cried.

A lot.

About everything.

All the time.

From my seat on that train, tears running down my face, still sitting next to the annoyed woman who’d launched my meltdown, I sent an email to my friend Krista. I concluded by saying, “In summary I am a mess,” which is a succinct but accurate assessment of much of those 10 months.

Moments later, things shifted. The train stopped and a handful of people boarded, including a blind man with a cane. Someone asked if I could get up so he could sit down and I gestured vaguely at my enormous stomach, at which point the man next to me got up and offered his seat instead. The man sat down next to me.

He introduced himself and we began chatting. I can’t remember his name, but he asked where I was getting off and when I told him, he said that was his stop too and would I be willing to walk him up to the platform?

Of course, I said.

The red line was under construction that summer, so everyone had to transfer to the green/yellow line in downtown D.C. and then transfer back at Fort Totten, which transformed every commute from a semi-reasonable task to a full-out nightmare. The man told me that he had been commuting for years on his own, always taking the same route, but the deviation had thrown him and so he had to ask for help these days. It wasn’t so bad, he said, except when people treated him like he wasn’t smart just because he couldn’t see.

“They also have a tendency to speak very loudly to me,” he said, then paused. “Literally, I am blind, not deaf.”

one of three trains I took to and from work that very long summer (film)

We discussed this on our way up to the other platform, his cane in one hand, his other arm resting lightly on mine. We chatted about the pains of commuting, and about his wife, and about my job. As we talked it dawned on me that he had no way of knowing that I was pregnant and that he had no idea that I had been sobbing minutes before we met, and those two facts felt absurdly freeing, like somehow this man who could not physically see me could still see me more clearly than anyone around us.

Pregnancy is a personal thing, but it is also a very public thing. Being visibly pregnant—as you are for most of the time when you are carrying twins—gives strangers a lot of very personal information about you without your consent. It makes some people feel like they can touch you, or stare at you, or ask you things they wouldn’t normally ask someone they don’t know, like questions about your medical history, or your family, or your plans for your life. As pregnancy progresses, even among people you love, conversations tend to be more about the baby you are carrying and less about you, the person, even though you, the person, are the one here, on the outside, experiencing everything. It can feel, at times, like Pregnant Person is your entire identity, even though you are still you, albeit with the addition of another being (two, in my case) and a host of complex, deeply private emotions.

So it was nice to speak to a stranger about things not related to my pregnancy, to stand with my hands resting comfortably on my bump but to not have to acknowledge its presence in the conversation.

It was the first time in a long time that I felt that way. It would be one of the last of my pregnancy.

The train finally came and we boarded together but sat separately. This was his regular route and he didn’t need assistance once he had returned to it, so we said goodbye. When I got off the train I touched him on the shoulder and said goodbye a second time. At home, I told Brandon about our brief encounter; how I had been crying and how this very regular conversation had somehow made it better. I was not a pregnant person to him and he was not a blind person to me, I said. We were just two people, equally irritated with the antics of the metro.

Regaining some semblance of my sense of humor, I smirked. Hatred of the metro, I concluded grandly, was the great equalizer.

A moment passed.

That’s a good story, Brandon said thoughtfully.

That’s the kind of thing you could write about, he added.

a sort of insight