No, it`s okay. Keep looking.

The folks trodding onto the last train out of Kawaramachi are either worn out or just looking to start their rowdy night somewhere in Osaka city. Anna and I have just gotten off of work and we're of the drowsy variety but it's okay since the Rapid Express sports plush, non-bleacher style, lounge seats facing one another in their pairs of four. The older and bolder passengers throw their bags into the seats across from them and prop their feet up with an air of privilege that surrounds those who have endured while others plop down in the available remainders.
There is an empty cell of seats near the back. I take the window seat, Anna sits beside me and in a few moments a middle-aged man in a black and charcoal jacket takes a seat our opposite. One stop up in Katsura, the carriage takes on a few more passengers and a young girl grabs the last seat in our section across from Anna. Her hair is dark and bundled beneath a knit cap which lets trail out a blue wire trafficking music. She's most likely thin but you couldn't tell what with the puffed-up down jacket enveloping her and the tall, white canvas UniQlo bag that she sits krinkling down into her lap; the brim resting just below her chin.
The boarding chime finishes its few twinkling notes, the doors seal together in a swoosh and the train is back on its way. There isn't another stop for miles. In the daylight, the trip through the countryside is gorgeous. It's as if the Virginian mountains packed up while no one was looking and took off to Kyoto, following romantic rumors of Buddhist footpaths and leaving behind the meth labs and shine stills for a fresh start abroad. But at night, there is only the cool blue city lights resting beneath an orange vault of light pollution. The moon beyond the glass is full and heavy in the sky, worth noticing, and so I nudge Anna. When I turn to back to her I can see her eyes are watering and she has her upper lip pulled tightly over a smile.
"What's with you?"
She shakes her head and looks away letting a snort out briefly before catching herself and turning back.
"Nothing, nothing," she interrupts herself with a bust of laughter. Calming down, she takes a deep breath and covers her mouth but then looses it, unable to catch the laughs rolling between her fingers.
"What the hell is so," but then I see it. It's the pair we're rubbing knees with.
My first thought is that there is a selective gas leak in the carriage. The man has fallen with his face against the window, his cheek and eyebrow pushed together; the one eye open in the likeness of a slain cyclops. The girl though must have never stood a chance. She is sitting upright with her hands resting palm up beside her, a pose which would presume complete alertness where it not for her head lolling loosely into the bag at her lap as if she had drowned while privately bobbing for apples.
For the last ten minutes of the ride I was in a stroke of laughter, looking outside or to my feet, biting back ha after ha while the sleeping duo jostled limply with the bumpings of the train. The next few stops are no help. At Awaji, the man animates and unsticks himself from the glass to exit. He wakes the girl in passing but not a minute out of the station she is already fighting in jerks against the invisible anchor about her neck and in two minutes she is back to the bag like an ether junkie huffed to death.
Across the aisle on the other side of the train a fashionable, young couple has taken to staring at me and Anna while we quietly quake and shush ourselves, perhaps wondering where we found such good weed. I nod at the guy and cock my head at the bouncing ragdoll next to us as if to say, "I know, right!? You think she found it yet?" but he's not having any of it.
I turn back to the window, avoiding Anna so I won't make more jokes, and watch nothing go by but my own reddened reflection, the girl behind me and the trendy fellow beyond shaking his head: Come off it buddy. This is gold!