September 28, 2008
One Page 47
As I waited at the train station I looked at the other people, looked in their faces until they looked at me and I looked away quickly, I drummed my hands against my thighs and felt the bench beneath me shake with my motion, unending, because I didn’t know how in that moment to sit still because the one person I wanted to see was nearly a million miles away, and even if it was less than that it didn’t matter because I wouldn’t see her anyhow, but I needed to do something in the meantime so drumming on my thighs seemed like the nearest thing I had to something productive to do that would, in theory, relax me. But it didn’t relax me and I couldn’t get her smile out of my mind and it was tearing my inside out until I felt like I could reach down and grab the guts that spilled out of me, throwing them against the station walls, brick and graffitied because the kids around here have nothing else but spray paint, and I would watch the blood trickled down running around the curves and crevices of the stones, already red but now much redder. A cloud passed and the skylighted ceiling tinted darker and my face was shrouded and everyone else’s face, waiting patiently looking left towards where the train would come from, and it was all dark for a moment until the cloud passed and all of our faces lit up again, shinny noses and foreheads, greasy hair, and bedraggled expressions, just waiting, and wanting, but not looking forward to. Looking forward to anything, none of us had that. We were going somewhere, who knows where, but it didn’t matter because it was probably a place we had been already, and if it happened to not be we probably weren’t excited anyhow because at this time in the late afternoon no one wants to be going where they are going because wherever that is there is nothing there, just emptiness. I could hear the train in the distance, just coming around the bend, and then it was there, screeched to a stop, green lights flashing as if we weren’t sure that the train was really there and we needed the lights to let us know. So green means go so I stood up and stopped drumming my thighs and my hands tingled with the constant motion suddenly stopped and I wondered what I would do with them once I got on the train because in close quarters it is hard to be nervous, wanting, waiting. They know you are wanting, waiting, and I don’t want them to know that so I will put my hands in my pockets and pretend that I am excited to go wherever it is that I am going, which is home, and I am not excited because it will be cold and dark and unused since it had been a while since I had been there. I thought of coffee and I thought of tongues dancing and I nearly banged my head.
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