At a Train Station
It was a window to her soul.
She thought these words, standing among one hundred wobbly-legged strangers, and immediately imagined giving herself a face palm. How utterly cliché. How obscenely boring. The women beside her dove headfirst into a stroller to retrieve her screaming child. It was this sort of unwilling bravery that made her want to stay on a train forever, refusing to get off and definitely not relinquishing the window seat.
A window to her soul. What kind of person thought that sort of thing? Women who walk into a library and head straight for the uncatalogued paperbacks. The romance section. These books will end up left out all night beside a pool, their pages dewy, their mediocre text threatening to seep into itself. Once dried, the wavy pages will make the book look thrice as large, and when asked about the damage the women will say “Oh that wasn’t me.” When asked about the book women will say “Oh it’s a wonderful story, I just can’t remember the title” and then they will add “But I know you would just love it.” Everything they say will sound as though it should be in italics. Slanted. Wispy.
The title would be about passion and restriction: The Duchess in the Dungeon, The Butcher’s Bedroom, Sadism at Sunrise.
The Widow’s Window.
The title would not be about screaming babies, drool on satin, or strollers getting stuck in security gates. There would be no impossibly tangled hair, wrinkled shirts, or stale faces. Something that used to be porridge. Melted crayon in the carpets. Lost balloon catastrophes. The woman emerged from the stroller covered with play toys. One magnificent pacifier sat in her hair like a halo.
Who would pick that window for their soul? A bright wedge illuminating a crowd of moronic, sniffling, acronym spouting, unapologetically lumpy, loud wanderers. Perhaps anyone would think it was their soul after spending 5 hours on that train. Pressed up against a man with a stain on his knee “In the same shape as my home state, see?” The size of The Huston State Fair.
The culture of Texas probably doesn’t require a very elaborate Wikipedia entry, she thought.
Is ‘the soul’ always meant to be figurative? Maybe there’s no such thing as a soul. Oh god, that’s a scary thing for an artist to be thinking. Well not quite an artist yet. Unless the diagrams she drew to help her study for her last sociology final counted.
She always felt like an artist, though. The way she could criticize a poorly worded sentence, or recognize an overused cliché. And the degree in the social sciences had to be good for something, right? She thought herself an artistic observer of people. It was a good start, the way she could recognize determination in a foot fall. The way she separated the idiotic from the mediocre. The way she knew the annoying ones from the worthwhile ones. Come to think of it, there had been less worthwhile ones lately. She must be even closer to artist-dom than ever.
Soon age would take this clarity away from her. She knew it. Something happened to adults, the woman with the soother hat, the man with the knee map. She knew her brain was destined to ripen into an ever accepting mush. It would think it was “mature” or worse, happy. She must grasp these moments in her life, allow her gifted insight to point out everything that was wrong with the world. She must wallow for it! She must express what it cannot. Finally! These morons didn’t know what they were missing.
It was a window to a train station.
And that was that.
