It’s hot and busy. People are everywhere. Walking purposefully, dodging each other, bags in their hands or hoisted on their shoulders. There’s a sense of great purpose, an urgency to reach an all important destination. They seem to know each other, some of them, nodding politely and occasionally breaking the stream of human bodies with a firm handshake or a full bodied hug. The rest smile indulgently and pass by. The flow resumes, purpose remains.
It’s hard to see her at first. Hard to notice her. Not because she blends in with them. Quite the contrary, she stands perfectly still- the only constant piece in an ever changing puzzle of faces and limbs and voices, all part of the heaving massive front of mankind.
She stands quietly, almost dejectedly. She doesn’t check her watch anymore. She stopped doing that a long time ago. Maybe it doesn’t even work now. She seems rigid at first glance, stiff, expectant almost. Yet her wispy hair and the look in her eyes reflects a softness. A finger taps against her thigh where she rests her hand. The tapping is not impatient, nor is it timed to some half forgotten music playing in her head- snatches of a song heard long ago. It’s simply a reminder maybe that time still passes by.
She thinks she hears the train coming. Why shouldn’t it? Everybody seems to be getting in and out of them, faces reflecting a light she craves. She thinks she hears it coming, yet she restrains herself from reaching for her bags. Bags packed so long ago, she no longer remembers what’s in them. The outsides are so worn and dusty, it almost doesn’t matter.
She wonders again whether she will get on. Board it and reach that mysterious, elusive destination. Or will she slip off, tumbling onto the tracks and be crushed by it. Crushed by the enormity, by the finality of it. She won’t know till the last minute. She’s dreamed it so. She read about it in her little novels, the ones she kept under her pillow as a girl. Novels she’s packed in her dusty bags but doesn’t remember. You never know till it comes they promised. Whether it will carry you forward, lift you up and take you home or if it will crush you without you even knowing it could do so, believing there is beauty in the pain and honesty in the scream. She no longer remembers which one she wanted.
Once again she thinks she hears it coming but she knows it is not so. The train is late again. It’s been late for so long.
The finger continues tapping against the pale cotton of her skirt. The people keep on moving. Time is fluid here.
