Train Tract No. 721: Middle Age Cliché…and Writing Anyway

I hold out as long as I can. According to train etiquette, I will be required to remove my coat and bag from the adjacent seat in due time. Honest passengers fill the seats. Sprinkled here and there are (what I perceive to be) the criminally insane. They populate my periphery as well. When I see their hoods, I turn away. Before the train lurches forward, I am joined by the young fellow with the Vulcan hair. His frequent companion, suitably pale and smiling, sits in front. Through the space between the seats, I see her black hair dangling above the open book in her lap. I breathe the air, perfumed with sweat, drained of its bacterial offense. I fetch another look, absorbing her, through the seats, and him, at my shoulder. They are young, protected from decay by the dewy shield of unblemished birth, fresh and pink. For a moment, I swim in my own ventricles as the world spins through my feet, and I long to read, to know, to understand what they read. She turns the page of the novel on her lap, he bends toward a textbook. My aging eyes fail to harvest the words in any logical order. Resisting a burning temptation to linger, I turn away, ignoring my desire for their words, the texture of their faces, the scent of their hair. In meditation I hear a cry. I awaken with a start. The seat next to the young woman had been vacated, allowing the couple to rejoin. She is at the window, and I touch my knees to the back of her seat. I watch him through the seats as the train moves away from my stop. The cry had been mine.