A Waiting Train
On the metaled ribcage of a train station bench, I remember sitting as still as I could though in fact I blossomed with jerked movements and effluent twitches. I wanted to drive my hands deep between the gaps of the seat, to clamp myself into a simulation of a quotidian stillness; the kind of unmoving we expect from the waiting person. Were I the only audience of myself I would have relaxed into the gentle taps and jigging that waiting for a train begets, into their gentle rhythms. However, a lanky businessman - clearly of a time where people watching, or person watching in this case, worked like the ticks of an alarm clock – sat two benches across from me on the opposite platform. I never in truth caught him glimpsing me, to do so I would have to have borne eyes on him for an uncomfortable period of time. It was enough nonetheless that with his circumspectatorial greed the oppression of his perception caused me to put on this show for him.
Riddled with fear of him catching my nervous corrections, I fell deeper into a whirl of dreams where he mocked me in various manners. In some he would simply tut to himself at the ridiculousness of this pretentious boy across from him attempting to hide his neuroticism. In others, he would beckon newcomers to mock me and increase the audience of my pantomime with all the characteristic boos and jeers. Of course, these grew more ridiculous. Each time I caught myself in such a state of daytime hallucination I’d offer up some generic reason as for why this would never happen, but the mathematical possibility of such an event outweighed any argument. Like Brennus casting his sword on the scales – ‘woe to the vanquished’. In this absurdist cinema, toing and froing from dreamlike forgetfulness of my body to the paranoid ossification of it, I had whiled enough time for a brief respite to come my way. The train, though hesitant to breach the thick tendrils of spite that leeched between the platforms, acquiesced and cut like a machete in the brush. Baying with the idiosyncratic slows and reprieves after the yielding of the swing.
No one could understand why I was running away, this made their plot seem more insidious. Of course, they could see I was strange and somehow marked with a sickliness that let the thin holes in my eyes. Of this I was more sure than anything. Yet, the local journalist writing me a tragic obituary would surely opine “he will be survived by his close and grieving family and his many friends” and with a nod to the future “he was a promising young man with stellar grades, his teachers…”. This thought infuriated me. I somehow stumbled into a life where by all accounts I was succeeding, I had friends and a good university ahead of me. I speak French, I like to swim – the heady dating profile of a Seine fish or a London metrosexual. Yet there was something wretched in it all, this outward appearance only convinced me more that I had to effect my normalcy more intently. I had more spectators and not one was capable of bearing a show executed without a perfect choreography. Surely, if they were so unwilling to make any mention of that sickliness leaving my eyes, they either lay in ambush for a more scientific expression of my otherness upon which to seize and brand me leper to others. Or, their tolerance was higher than I gave them credit.
I was giving them this gift, I was running away. What ‘normal’ person runs away? After all, the whole idea of it in the modern day is so laughable. As though I pitch my yurt in a barren steppe and travel in solitude on end. I was heading to Bristol.
I clambered on the train, while twisting in these revelries I bumped a woman with my bag and felt sick. I apologised but my voice was cracked and she didn’t understand me. I judged she’d rather enjoy being able to retell the ignominy of my seeming unrepentance to her friend on the phone than hear my second attempt, I gave her that pleasure. My skin itched with every sound on the train, every whisper was the observant pointing out my awkward movements, my misshapen stubble, my awkward expression, my effeminate fashion. Laughs fell on me like daggers and I rustled in my bag to draw out my headphones but put only one in my ear, in case they were plotting to attack me.
Blood pounded in my ears hard as my eyes darted like gnats on the carcass of my esteem. My pores opened under the heat of their glares but I could not sweat for the sake of revealing my awareness of their mockery. I saw a documentary where jackals, recently engorged on a kill, laughed at a gazelle. The gazelle spotted them long before they spotted her – only when the gazelle made overt to the jackals that she knew of their jokes did they feel threatened and pounced to kill and not to eat.
I hurried out the train without breaking a run, I was spinning trying to flee the presence of any human speech and human look. I felt beastly, like a werewolf as the moon creeps beyond a cloud into broad moonlight. My anxiety engorged on the bloody mass of the pretentiousness of my metaphors as I parsed this dazing experience in monologues and muIers. I started frantically making plans and under the slightest sense of others catching wind of them, broke them. I was paralysed in movement, afraid to stop walking lest someone figure out I was fleeing. I took turns, looking over my shoulder while crossing to see if any pedestrians had been on the same track long enough to piece together my flight. The inevitability of their pursuit bore on my shoulders and stiffened my neck. I was afraid now to even look lest they discover I was conscious of anything remotely. I now buried my head in the low hang of a man in the stocks, I was staring at my feet. Tetrahedral silver flagstones and great tricoloured black pillars towered either side of me as I watched my feet precessing like a centrifuge, the vignette of sense narrowed as the intensity of watching myself in this way suffocated any other sensation. This was a brief moment of peace. A car struck me in the side at 23mph.