The subway car was half-empty at 2 AM, which meant the man in the gray coat had plenty of seats to choose from. He chose the one directly across from me. I'd been writing in my notebook—a scene where a character discovers their reflection has started moving independently—when I felt his stare. Not the quick, dismissive glance city dwellers exchange. The kind that settles in and stays.

I kept writing, scratching out a line that felt too obvious. The character would notice the discrepancy slowly, I decided, not all at once. A hand moving a fraction of a second too late. A blink that doesn't quite sync. The man across from me shifted, and when I glanced up, he was reading a book with its cover turned inward against his palm. Hiding it, or just holding it that way? I couldn't tell.

"Do you believe in doubles?" he asked, not looking up from his concealed pages.

The question hung there like subway brake dust, gritty and unavoidable. I should have put in earbuds. Should have moved cars. Instead I said, "The doppelgänger kind, or the literary kind?"

"The kind where you meet yourself and one of you has to die." He said it matter-of-factly, the way you'd discuss weather or train delays. Then he stood at the next stop and left, book still pressed against his palm, title unknown.

I sat there for three more stops, staring at the empty seat across from me. The scene in my notebook had changed in my mind. Now the character wouldn't notice their reflection was wrong. The reflection would notice them. Would realize it was the one trapped behind glass, watching its original live the life it should have had.

When I got home, I rewrote the entire thing from the reflection's point of view. It was better that way. More honest. The unsettling part isn't being watched—it's realizing you might be the copy, and the person you thought was your reflection has been free all along. I didn't use a single word he said, but somehow that conversation rewrote everything. That's how the best material comes: sideways, at 2 AM, from a stranger who asks one question and leaves you with a hundred more.

The gray coat, the hidden book, the empty seat—I'll use them eventually. Just not yet. They need time to ferment, to become something other than what they were. Fiction isn't reporting. It's alchemy. You take the lead of real life and turn it into something that glints.

#fiction #writing #latenight #subway #doppelganger