on the train

He awakens to the susurrations of a silly lullaby; a woman attempts anew to placate her lachrymose baby — he is stretched between her arms. His fists rise violently, defiantly into the air. He won’t relinquish consciousness and succumb to the mental stupefaction that sleep is — to nothingness.

The mother and child lose his attention. In stead, he turns to the scenery that is rapidly unfolding before his eyes outside his window. He pauses to stare at his watch, a simple force-of-habit.

The train passes through a town and he sees some people here and there, but it is too fast, too dazzling, too surreal. But isn’t that life? The train simply exaggerates reality, briefly. Each individual, every single one of those people in that town is a fluid story of equally lucid events of lies, truths, joys and tears. These qualified events are, so to speak, hidden from the observer not behind a veneer of indifference but one of circumstance; the indifference then follows.

He pulls himself from the monotonous landscapes of sundry colors, all taken from a patina of the most bland and dull; they inopportune — unmemorable. But the land continues, it does not require his ocular patronage.

He realizes he will never see these people again; perhaps he will chance to turn a corner as they are about to come in sight, but more than that, impossible. He pulls himself together, sits up properly as if driven under the realization: “I am alone. I shall always be alone, thus I ought to be strong, for my sake.”

The train pulls into the next station, here he must get off, here he says good-bye to his companions on this half of his odyssey (but we mustn’t interpret this as intimating that there is a set destination for him, that there is meaning, far from it). But before he is able to understand this, his attention is consumed by disembarking. There is no time for a farewell, a simple adieu or even a merci. Oh well, such is life.


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