Strangers on a train

Trainee teacher Megan Smith and engineer Dominic Iemma made a connection during their morning commute to work. Almost four years later, the pair are happily married and making beautiful music together. By Josephine Brouard.

It was just another grey winter’s morning when Megan Smith, a young student teacher, boarded the 7.22am train headed for Glen Waverley in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. As she adjusted the woollen scarf around her neck, Megan ticked off a mental checklist of the things she would need for her classes that day. She had recently finished three years of university, where she’d studied teaching, with majors in piano and harpsichord. Now she was doing her final student-teacher round, sharing her love of music with a classroom of primary-school students. Megan smiled to herself as she thought of some of the kids in her classes, but her reverie was suddenly interrupted when a dark, broodingly handsome stranger in a beanie and overcoat boarded the train. 

Megan was struck by the stranger’s composure and all thoughts of music classes flew out of her head. “He was dark haired, handsome and seemed aloof: I thought he looked like a mafioso and I was intrigued,” she recalls. “My curiosity was piqued, but he looked a bit older than me – I was pretty sure he’d be married.”

For the ensuing 40 minutes, until the train reached Megan’s destination, the student teacher daydreamed about the fellow sitting opposite her in the train’s front carriage. She wondered who he was; what he did for a living; whether he played music; what kind of music he listened to; and, most importantly, whether she would ever see him again. Thoughts rushed through her brain about all the movies she’d seen of people meeting on trains, then never crossing paths again. Briefly, she imagined herself as Julie Delpy meeting Ethan Hawke, as per one of her all-time favourite films, Before Sunrise. When the time came for her stop, Megan took a last look over her shoulder and made a silent prayer: “Please… please let him be on the train again tomorrow.”

Miraculously, the dark-haired stranger was on the platform for the 7.22am train the following day, and once again sat down in the front left-hand seat of the carriage. “I noticed her, too,” remembers Dominic Iemma. “I noticed she was new on the train and I liked her hair.”

Megan, meanwhile, continued to daydream about the handsome stranger sitting opposite her. Being inherently impulsive, she concocted plans to strike up a conversation with him, but it was tricky and she felt abnormally shy. A couple of days passed and she noticed that her fellow commuter seemed to like sitting in the same place. She also noticed that no-one dared to take ‘his’ seat. No-one, that is, except Megan, who positioned herself in the stranger’s seat the next morning. The beanie-clad commuter boarded the train soon afterwards and, noticing his spot was taken, gave Megan a sideways glance and promptly sat on the opposite side of the carriage. Megan was crestfallen: how was she going to find out more about this handsome stranger if he didn’t sit close by?

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