Mind The Gap

The subway was delayed again. I hated waiting for it, not because my feet hurt or my jacket was too thin or the middle-aged man next to me reeked of piss and loneliness, but because I had to stand still. I pretended my feet to be glued to the asphalt beneath me and tried to drag my mind away from the fact that the subway was somewhere right now, with the privilege to move. It took that away from me and the world kept spinning but I was glued to the ground.

I counted the seconds in my head, extra slowly, two, three, four, something I had learned to do at home, self-invented concept of time to count the seconds my parents were taking to fight.

Twenty-six, twenty-seven. The girl and her bigger brother that were occupying the only opportunity to sit were getting louder in their banter. She burst out bubbles of joy from her brother tickling her and earned the dark gazes of people that were stuck in life and miserable in their choices. I caught myself being one of them and softened my features to a smile.

Sixty-two. Be the difference you want to see in people. The roar of the opposite lane’s train leaving momentarily drowned every other noise. I could feel the vibrations buzzing through my body and taking a part of me with it. A-hundred-and-forty. I should have brought more glue. My phone rang. The man next to me coughed red strings that turned to bubbles in the air and glid past stone-faced, miserable, stuck people. Red is always either a sign of warning or of love. One learnt that in pre-school. Either way, I thought, it was a colour intense enough to be considered worth noticing. But no one did. I wondered if they did not care or did not believe. Two-hundred-and-twenty-one.

“What’s taking so long?”

”There’s a delay.”

I loved my mother but she worried much too much. The little girl had her own watch, pink and yellow with little bumblebees printed to the wristband. She had stopped squealing and was reading the time, attentively. Perhaps her brother had shut her up. Perhaps it was time to grow up and choose between carelessness and disbelief. Three-hundred-and-fifty.

This had usually been the marking number that whatever it was they had been fighting over would not be forgotten as soon as dinner was ready. If I came all the way to Three-hundred-and-fifty, then there was rarely much to talk about. Sixty was still fine. A-hundred-and-eighty meant that by dinner the house had gone back to its roots. Three-hundred-and-fifty meant being careful and everything above that I could watch television until deep at night because they would both be very tired and the house very silent.

I loved my father’s new apartment because it smelled of fresh paint and now I could stay up watching television every time I slept at his house. They sat down and looked at me with grave faces and grey hands and said it was up to me to decide whether to live with him or her. That whatever I did they would still love me. For the first month I stayed with my mom during the day because I liked the smell of the food she cooked and at night I stayed at my dad’s and up all night. It seemed to be a tie to me for longer. My father bought me everything I wished for, which was nice at first but changed his image in the long run. My mother kept telling me she loved me. And so I stayed with her for the most part, in the end. 

Five-hundred-and-two. There was a major poster hanging on the dirty brick wall by the platform. It was a condom advertisement. ‘Wherever love comes knocking, be ready.’ I would never understand how they managed to advertise something using love for something that prevents love-caused misery. It reminded me of my English teacher in primary school, who would go out every break to smoke half a pack of cigarettes. I had always asked myself why it was that adults seeked self-destruction so eagerly. Much later did I realize that it was only a matter of time until life took a leap and did it itself. It is surely easier to have forecome this and done it yourself. That way one did not have to cower and wait trembling for the fatal, final hit but sit and smoke a cigarette and know that no one could reach into your chest when you had removed your heart years ago yourself. That you had to become your own villain so no one else could. It seemed to be like that with cigarettes and sex and most of all love.

The man reeking of piss was gone. I wondered if he could not bear the waiting for the same reason I couldn’t. If there was someone somewhere waiting for him. I could have regretted not sharing my glue with him but I didn’t. Some people needed to be some place quicker than others. 

I had asked my mother why, only months later. She said they simply could not love each other anymore. I sat and nodded and smiled as if I understood but really I couldn’t. I knew even then that love was not an easy thing to understand. But it was an easy thing to do. To this day I have never looked back and realized that I had stopped loving. I still loved our old house and I still loved the girl from next door and I still loved dancing and reading and the fire hydrant down-town into which everyone had carved their initials, including me. I still loved The Little Mermaid and my stuffed animal, even if I was too old for both now. I still loved my dad even if I didn’t forgive him, even if that meant crossing the road so that I did not have to speak to him. Five-hundred-and-ninety.

Being an adult sucked. Working makes people who they are, takes up their lives in a volume that prevents any other option but melting career over identity, bowl of life’s ingredients, the older one gets, the more sugar-substitutes. Brownies were my mother’s favorite but I refused to help her bake them. Linus sat next to me in English and he said we had gotten too old for mothers and everyone who would hug theirs good-bye before class was to be excluded from the circle with the cool kids. So I stopped hugging her. And I stopped baking with her because Linus had a lot of friends and so he must have been right. I only went to the door of the kitchen and opened it slightly, so I could smell the warm mix of chocolate and eggs and her perfume that she had changed after the divorce. 

At six-hundred, there was a low, ever-building roar from the tunnel. Luckily, I always had my glue-remover with me. The girl jumped up, dragged at her brother’s hand. One could see it was a habit, the way they walked, six steps forward, stop, clock-work, four feet neatly together, lined, parallel, fit for society. Mind the gap between the train and the platform.

The train came rushing in with force, pressing before it a wall of all the stations it had already passed, collecting the ghosts of lives and protecting them, treasure to keep - the people itself won’t do it. Metal against metal, the wagon came to a halt. I let the two siblings conquer before me, impatience nestling in their very being. I missed such unconscious perspective only youth seemed to carry; Knowing a whole life lying before one and still aiming on taking with you every second of it, to be the first on the train and at the party and to offer one’s help. Always be the first, don’t miss a second of it. I knew now that the train would let everyone in before departing and that it would make a beeping-sound as a reminder that the doors now would close, time, time, enough time when there was so little left in general. 

Mind the gap between the train and the platform. They all looked down at their feet, everyone who was on their own and did not have a companion to shift their attention onto, to carry the burden of anonymity. I wanted to look at them, at every single one of their faces and imagine life through their eyes but people got angry when they felt observed, seen, maybe understood even. I had never understood this.

A curve and the train was blanketed by darkness, reducing man back to his core instinct, roar of metal against metal against metal, rush of passing stone and heat and glued feet, a baby crying.

The smell of piss again, and sweat. Pungent but neutralised by his nostrils.

“You’re blocking my way.”

He blinked up to the stark contrast of a man against the sun, summer heat glimmering in the space between the men, creating a distance that the countenance seemed to need even more than him.

“Sorry.” He rasped, clumsy hands clasping together, dragging himself up and away from the doorstep, joints aching, familiarity of the feeling almost comforting. 

“Fucking vagrants. There’s institutions for you, you know. Not my house though.” He made use of the keys before his doorstep, tall man with a black suit, despite the heat. Steady hands fumbling with the lock, coordinated, habit, learnt.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sure you are. Might want to spend your money on other things next time.”

He had not looked him in the face once. He was sure it was because he was scared of mutuality. To catch some of the disease he seemed to hold, deeply-rooted, never to be cured, never to be lived, only inside other’s minds, always inside other’s lives. He needed to look people in the eye to be able to escape his own life but they rarely ever let him. Too scared to give up part of their structure-based life, normal-peopled issues and adult-poisoned minds to the puddle lying before their doorstep, begging the heroine in his veins to make him anyone else, anyone at all but him.

The child was long dead and the yellow-pink watch had stopped ticking. Never had he driven the subway, and he never would.