I was twenty-four and having the kind of silent crisis that's invisible from the outside. Job falling apart. Relationship ending. The particular feeling of having constructed a version of your life that turned out to be wrong.
On a train from Edinburgh to London — six hours — I ended up next to an older man who was reading a very large book. We didn't speak for the first two hours.
Then the trolley came and we both ordered tea and something in the small awkwardness of managing cups on a small tray made us start talking.
I don't know why I told him as much as I did. He was a good listener, maybe. Or maybe I just needed to say it out loud to someone who didn't know me.
When we pulled into King's Cross he closed his book, put on his coat, and said: "Everything you're describing — it sounds like the last day of something, not the first day of nothing. Those feel the same from inside them, but they aren't."
He got off the train. I never learned his name. I have repeated those words to myself probably a thousand times since.