The tram after the shops closed

An original literary non-fiction-style account of travelling through a city on an evening tram.

By the time I boarded, the shops had pulled their bright rectangles out of the street. Shutters covered the windows, and the pavement returned only a few broken patches of light. Inside the tram, everything seemed unusually legible: a blue seat, a pale hand gripping a rail, the neat black instructions above the door.

We moved past a row of dark windows. In the glass beside me, the passengers travelled over them as reflections. A woman's red scarf crossed the closed bakery, a sleeping child's forehead rested briefly against a bank sign, and my own face floated above a parked van. The city and the carriage occupied the same surface without quite belonging to one another.

At a stop, the doors opened and a cold strip of street entered. A man came aboard carrying a bunch of flowers wrapped in paper. He stood them upright between his shoes and held the rail with both hands. The paper made a small dry sound each time the tram turned. Across the aisle, someone lowered the volume of a telephone conversation.

We passed another tram going the other way. For a few seconds, rows of faces and lights moved alongside ours, close enough to seem part of the same long room. Then they slid away, and our reflections returned to the dark windows. I could still see the flowers between the man's shoes, a small upright colour which the journey had not yet delivered anywhere.

How does the writer use language to present the tram as connected with, but separate from, the city outside?