Every once in a while, I feel acutely aware that the people I am wedged between on the peak hour train are not just strange faces, but are personalities and hearts and souls and minds with relationships and heartaches and goals and anxieties.

Maybe that's an obvious thing to observe, but I certainly don't think I engage with them as though all those things are true.

If I do engage, it's probably just with a smile or a glance; an awkward sidle past, brushing thighs or bums or whatever; spending an hour in silent company, feeling the rise and fall of our common humanity as we breathe in the metallic tang of CityRail...

Furrowed brows seem to be the most pervasive (if not characterising) expression of these strangers.

Occasionally one will spring to life at the recognition of a friend or acquaintance: the obliged civility or genuine banter while away the otherwise loud silence of the trip. We are all busy texting or tweeting or iPod'ing or emailing or pretending to work, but all secretly listening in on a snapshot of the lives of the speakers, constructing personalities and circumstances behind the words.

But the furrows and creases return, projecting to the world a seriousness and a busy importance - as though worth were tied to how never-ending the To Do list whirring inside one's head is, how many commitments one has to juggle, how stressful one's workplace is, or how many people need you to function.

Maybe that's not what they convey. Maybe that's just my female over-analytical mind making a nuisance of itself. Maybe people do just need their time-out space.

But I wonder at the furrowed brows. I wonder at these people so close physically to me, yet so disconnected in every other sense.

It makes me think of Frederick Buechner's words...

But there is another truth, the sister of this one, and it is that every man is an island. It is a truth that often the tolling of a silence reveals even more vividly than the tolling of a bell. We sit in silence with one another, each of us more or less reluctant to speak, for fear that if he does, he may sound like a fool. And beneath that there is of course the deeper fear, which is really a fear of the self rather than of the other, that maybe the truth of it is that indeed he is a fool. The fear that the self he reveals by speaking may be a self that the others will reject just as in a way he has himself rejected it. So either we do not speak, or we speak not to reveal who we are but to conceal who we are, because words can be used wither way of course. Instead of showing ourselves as we truly are, we show ourselves as we believe others wants us to be. We wear masks, and with practice we do it better and better, and they serve us well - except that it gets very lonely inside the mask, because inside the mask that each of us wears there is a person who both longs to be known and fears to be known...

I want to be maskless. So that people can feel free being maskless around me.