Between stations

The train came to a loud screeching halt halfway through its route and didn’t start again. Sleepily, I looked outside. Beyond the smudged glass, sunlight was beginning to rise, its yellowish rays soaking into the cold fog, thick as milk.

Quietly, I joined the growing crowd. For a moment, I looked up from my phone, gaze aimlessly fixed on the stairs leading out of the concrete underpass- and suddenly, he was standing there.

Like me, he had a phone in his hand, earphones in. A surprised look flashed in his eyes, like a reflection in a mirror. The longer I looked into them, the more it seemed they hinted at something I didn’t quite understand. Didn’t want to understand.

I remembered a huge ballroom with a high ceiling. That evening, we were rehearsing choreography for one of the balls. The assistants, all wearing stiff smiles, were shouting out instructions and moving us sharply from place to place. We were supposed to line up in pairs- he stood beside my friend, I next to someone I was dancing with that night. Another wave of instructions, and everyone joined hands.

I looked down at our interlaced fingers. It felt a little awkward, so I glanced up at him to say something, but he was already talking to someone else. Didn’t even look at me.

We said goodbye in the subway. After he was gone, lost between dozens of blurred faces, I inhaled deeply, slowly. Felt my lungs fill with tension. His voice echoed in my head. “Well, that was a surprise.” A trace of confidence. Green eyes and dimples.

“He’s so sweet,” she said, her fingers slipping between mine.

Her lips curved into a bright smile, I caught it reflected in her even brighter eyes. Her happiness was contagious, though she never seemed to notice it herself. She never saw the impression she left on others, nor how, piece by piece, she put it all together- her lightness, how she drifted through every room. The flash of honesty in her eyes. The concentrated look with distant thoughts and flushed cheeks. Thick blonde hair. Her wide smile, firm hugs, sometimes lingering too long. She fit it all together like a puzzle.

“I’m so glad I finally found someone to dance with,” I smiled at her and thought, “John” was a dull name. At first glance, it suited him.

The next morning, I took the first free seat I found and rested my head against the window. A slow turning of the wheels echoed softly. Landscape blurred before my eyes, only the sky stayed still.

After a while, I noticed him. He looked around as if searching for someone, a crease of concentration on his brow. When our eyes met, he smiled and made his way toward me.

Next time, it was in the subway. A faint flutter deep in my stomach. It didn’t stop, it made me feel queasy. Or maybe it was just the stuffiness. My eyes scanned faces until they landed on his. He was already looking. From across the car, I smiled at him without meaning to.

Everything with him felt easy, always natural and relaxed. It gave me a feeling of certainty. Each conversation built on the last until we could talk about anything. I saw him so often that after a while I only remembered fragments- how the wind sometimes messed up his hair, hiding his terrible haircut. His hoodies, the way he tugged at the sleeves when he was nervous. The flutter in my stomach when our knees accidentally touched, and neither of us pulled away.- Sometimes they came to my mind during endless physics classes or just before I fell asleep.

I loved when he told stories. Even the dullest ones sounded interesting from him, always made me laugh. As long as we didn’t talk about her, everything about him seemed annoyingly perfect. I didn’t want to hurt her.

A few times, I suddenly stopped mid-conversation. A mocking tone. Eyes staring hard at the ground. Guilt twisted quietly in my gut. I didn’t want to talk about her with him, but I always remembered how her face lit up when she told me he walked her home from the tram- even though he had to go back the opposite way. How the soft blonde strands of her hair spilled over her broad shoulders in uneven waves. How she radiated so much energy and happiness that it seemed to swallow everything around her.

I started to feel the draining heaviness of disappointment. Most of the time, I just shrugged and didn’t answer.

As soon as we left the changing room where we barely exchanged a few words, she peeled away from us. She headed down the stairs, her heels clicking softly in rhythm. Toward him. There she leaned against the railing, tilting her head slightly as she laughed at something.

The shine of a glass chandelier caught her blue short dress and reflected in her eyes. Everything about her looked elegant. The contrast between them seemed funny.

She hung on every word he said, nodding or shaking her head in turn. Small dimples appeared on her cheeks, her pupils dilated under the angled light. Filled with admiration.

Several times I wondered what had driven him away from her, but in the end, I only thought about her. Never anyone else’s, always her own. She didn’t like silence in conversation and nervously filled it with whatever came to mind. Nervousness soon turned to calm, as if the sound of her own voice soothed her.

She loved to talk- about everything, about nothing, about whatever- and when someone seemed interested, she gave them a wide smile.

She was kind. Not too much, not to everyone, but when she thought someone deserved it or when she cared. I still remember the last day of school before summer, before I transferred. Tight hugs, tangled strands of blonde hair, and tearful whispered words.

She had the ability to come off as extraordinary. I didn’t understand how anyone could see her differently.

The café was stuffy. I sipped cold water from the glass in front of me and turned back to him. “She wasn’t angry, more like… sad and-” I looked into his eyes. They were beautiful, piercing green, slightly drooping at the corners. I had never noticed that before. The amusement from earlier was gone, replaced by a flicker of regret.“-I don’t know,” I finished my little confession.

“Do you think I should apologize to her?” he asked after a while. That surprised me.

I pictured it in my mind.

I crossed my arms on the tall table in front of us and rested my head on them with a quiet “hmm.”

I realized how tired I was. I wanted to close my eyes, but instead, they wandered toward the bar stool next to me and met his. Everything was bathed in dim light. The café felt cramped, suffocating with ever-changing faces, voices, and lives- just fragments of them flashing by. Caught in the middle of it all, he sat gently pulling at the sleeves of his black hoodie. Still smiling.. Dimples. I hid mine in my tea cup.

Every word made me focus on him more and more, until I felt closer to him than I really was. Barely a breath apart.

The room felt suffocating.

“Sorry, I need to get a drink,” I mumbled toward the dark-eyed boy with the terrible haircut in front of me, and without waiting for an answer, slipped away to the table by the wide pillar.

There she stood, an absent smile on her tired face. With fingers clenched tightly in front of her, as if to shield herself. I took her hand, and together we pushed through the crowd toward the exit. We laughed as we slipped through the large decorated doors into the night behind them.

We stood under the stars, shivering from the cold, sharing an apple, when she suddenly said, “If you hadn’t found me, I would have cried.”

Every time I smiled at him on the morning train, I felt myself caring more and more about whether he would smile back. When I brought up something or someone from his past, he spoke about things that didn’t seem right to me. His tone remained as carefree as always. That surprised me. I sometimes had to avoid his piercing gaze, the apparent indifference in his voice confused me. Soon I realized why he saw things that way. With every conversation, he grew more and more open, as if he needed someone to listen.

I understood him- often so much that I felt like I was looking into a mirror. In those moments, there was something in his eyes that I had never found in anyone else. It struck me how much I wanted to hear everything from him, and yet the feeling was heavier than I expected. I knew I could listen- but not help.

Dad sitting on the seat across from me laughed. For the last ten minutes, I barely listened to him, every word floated somewhere between reality and dreams until eventually all of them got lost and nothing made sense. I didn’t try to focus. The familiar sound of his voice was lulling me to sleep. I briefly smiled at him, then turned my head toward the cold window and the passing landscape beyond.

The train was still half-empty, a thrown-aside jacket and backpack lay on the empty seat next to me. The light above us flickered with a quiet buzzing. Looking at the sign announcing the next station, my stomach suddenly clenched with nervousness. Everything seemed to snap back into the present. With a loud screech of wheels on the rails, we stopped.

After a short, awkward introduction, Dad moved elsewhere with several repeated “It’s nothing, no worries, I’ll text you later.” I reached for my jacket on the seat next to me and folded it in my lap. He quietly sat opposite me. We smiled at each other awkwardly. Talked about my classmate who he knew from summer camp.

I told him how happy she always seems, not forced happy, but genuinely, truly, the kind that makes you happy too just by being around her. He told me that he thinks she feels everything very deeply. That she just buries these feelings deep under layers and layers of laughs and pretending, until it feels like they don’t exist. It wasn’t until much later that i thought- Is that how you think she feels, or is that how you feel? I wish I had asked him that. I wish I had asked him so many things. Even later on, I thought- Is that how I think you feel, or is that how I feel?

When we said goodbye, we didn’t hug. We never hugged.

Our conversations often circled back to his ex-girlfriend, unintentionally, as if everything naturally led to her. The more I got to know the people in her life, the harder it was not to worry about her. Not a single day passed without me thinking about it.

She existed only through others’ eyes. A best friend. An ex-girlfriend. A camp buddy. I knew her from stories, filled with pain she didn’t know how to handle, and from photos, steady and distant.

Sharp eyebrows. Full soft lips. A penetrating gaze, often so deep it seemed bottomless. Empty. Sometimes a smile reflected there- when she stood with arms around a friend on a ski slope, or sat with eyes closed, leaning on the same friend at a birthday table.

She felt so far away, like a passing thought, and yet I wanted so badly to help her. I looked into her silent eyes and hoped she knew how beautiful she was, that he had told her often. That he had told her every day.

His decisions started making less and less sense to me, like grains of sand slipping quietly through my fingers. Trying to hold onto them felt too exhausting. It was strange. In so many ways, I understood him perfectly- and at the same time, I kept desperately trying to make sense of everything he did. It was starting to wear me out.

The metro couldn’t have been more crowded, the air a mix of sweat and dozens of perfumes. I looked him in the eyes with a faint smile. A sharp inhale. Fading confidence.

Suddenly I became aware of how close we were standing. I nodded along in silence, interrupting only occasionally with small, irrelevant questions. I wanted to ask about other things, but I didn’t. It wasn’t hard to let them go. To relax.

For a moment, the thought of how easy it would be to reach out and pull him just a little closer crossed my mind.

He said goodbye with dimples on his cheeks, rushing to finish his story.

Half-asleep, I reached for my phone, checked the time, and saw a long message. I squinted and read the first sentence. My breath hitched. I felt the feeling of helplessness slowly filling my whole body.

I got up quickly and began my usual routine for school. My hands moved fast and mechanically, giving no space for thinking. Before I knew it, I was dressed, sitting at the table with breakfast in front of me. I picked up the spoonful of strawberry yogurt I’d already scooped. Swallowed. My stomach turned. Until now, I hadn’t noticed how much it hurt.

Everything suddenly sharpened, last night replayed in my mind. A sharp, uncomfortable pain spread through my chest.

I wrote essays late into the night, laughed with my friend on the metro ride home, studied for tests during breaks, packed, went to France, came back from France, and for the first time in nine days, found myself alone in my room. After an hour of tossing and turning, I gave up on sleep. Thoughts started to swirl inside me in endless, painful spirals.

They were everywhere.

I shut my eyes tight, drew a shaky breath, and focused only on the quiet tears that started to gently slide down my cheeks, soaking into my hair.

I thought about everything, over and over, until all the thoughts wore themselves out. At first, they had no start, no end- but eventually, they began to make sense, if I made up the meaning long enough. Some things I decided not to make sense of at all. I couldn’t name them anyway.

Other things were simple.

From the beginning, I had felt the inevitability of the end, and I wasn’t surprised when it came. He surprised me. His closeness, and how right it had felt in some moments. When I try to return to those moments, in the empty pauses of my free time when there’s nothing to distract me, the edges of his face blur, and I can’t remember what his voice sounded like. The more I try to focus, the faster it all slips away, so I always let go.

A slow song, so loud that I can’t hear the people around us. I don’t notice them. Dim lights. High ceiling. Firm arms, first around my shoulders, then around my waist for a change. Blonde waves frame her face and fall down her back. Big green eyes.

“I love you so much,” she says softly into my ear.

“Me too.”

My answer doesn’t make sense. I’m too drunk to correct myself. To talk about this. I think she understood anyway. I feel her slim waist against mine, the music steals all my thoughts.

We’re sitting in the backseat of a car, city lights cast long shadows across her face. Dilate her pupils. I hardly notice my dad behind the wheel in front of us. The red dress with thin straps fits her perfectly. It’s just before midnight, she seems more vulnerable in the dark.

We’re talking about him again. We sound casual, like he’s infinitely distant, buried in the past.

“I was really hurt.” I recognize the sting of guilt, it also feels distant. It catches me off guard.

“I cried about it a lot.”

She somehow manages to say this casually too, like it doesn’t concern her. Like she’d been working up the courage to tell me for a long time. I want to say I never meant to hurt her. Even in my head, it sounds hypocritical, I know how much pain I caused. I can’t get a word out. We talk about something else for a while.

“I really liked him. I didn’t want to. I tried so hard not to like him. I tried to avoid him, but then I’d always run into him in the metro and… well, I couldn’t try anymore. It was awful.” I don’t even know what I’m referring to, maybe my feelings, or his feelings, or how I let myself feel them.

It feels like I’m saying only half of what I wanted to. I look into her eyes and see how she hangs on every word. A blush on our cheeks. A look full of emotion.

“Do you think you’d start liking him again if you saw him?” Back to casual. She smiles, understanding flashes in her eyes.

“Maybe?” I wrinkle my nose slightly.

“I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter, because I’ll never see him again. I can’t. Really, never again.”

I feel completely sober. Present. I don’t understand my own feelings, just like I don’t understand hers. I don’t know if we’ll be okay. If we ever really can be. But I don’t want to think about the future, I just want to be here, now, with her.

When I fall asleep that night, I can still smell her on me, and there’s a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. I don’t think it’ll ever go away.