Sunday, January 01, 2006

7 :

7:

You’re just a girl. And I am just a boy. Just like everyone else. Just like me. You’re, say, somewhere between five foot and six foot tall, and so wide, and like me, like everyone else, you’re an individual. An selection of personality traits taken from supermarket shelves and factory assembly lines. Maybe you’ve got a tattoo – a flower, or a animal on your ankle, or a star on your belly. An individual, like everyone else. And we all stand, like the rest of us, in our hundreds, our thousands, the three and a half million of us that commute into the Big City every working day, streaming into the heart of the country in cars, carriages, trains and tubes, we all stand, yawning in the morning, waiting to go, to find somewhere to sit for fourteen hundred pounds a year, and not even knowing if you’re going to have somewhere to sit.

And sometimes, if I am brave, if I think I can somehow pass for something other than a jaded insomniac, I try to sit near you. I try to catch your eye. Find out what book you are reading. How it might influence you. What you might do about it. What that says about you. Hoping you might notice me as more than just a shape that you have to avoid when the train gets into the city. Hoping that this Commuter Bullet, that shoots us to and from our places of work, might just be the place that our first moments of love blossom.

And there you are again, with that coat, with those shoes, those dull, tired eyes, that squeeze shut, trying to block out the world, and so I realise that there is probably some special someone somewhere , who sees your face each morning, each evening, each night, who kisses you hurriedly whilst he too races for the morning train, each rushed morning kiss and each sleepless kiss of dreams, and he may not even know how lucky he is, how lucky we all are, to live in this world of comfort, privilege and Playstations.

I knew this would happen, someday, one day. I just didn’t know when. When we would part, as all of us eventually do, be it death or work, without ceremony or tears, when you would move to a path different from I. And you slip away, out of view, no longer headed to the same place as I, no grand farewell, we both disappear. And I know that today, like yesterday, like tomorrow, will not be our first day as lovers.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home