Winds of Past On the Subway
By: Shalini C
Tags: Poetry, Short Story, Fiction

Image Source: Columbia.Edu

She was getting by with just another start of day, assembling small pieces of a busy Monday in her mind, craning her head for the train in impatience.

She’s blinded by the gusting sea of people around, her olfactory sense, as usual, tormented by intermingled odours of sweat, greasy food and cologne.

And right then, from across the subway, she saw him, an old love, spring up from a corner of the concrete jungle, like an unexpected bloom in the midst of an autumn grey and gloom.

At first, she could hardly contain her vision. Is he for real? Is her past, seemingly bleeding into her longing to escape another day of dull prospects, illuminating a long-deserted road?

She looked at him again. All the details….His long black coat that seems oddly familiar, his insipid eyes that lit up at the slightest provocation, his anatomy narrating the passage of time in his evidently larger frame.

It’s as if she couldn’t look away. Far and farther, yet here they were, standing under the same blanketing dispersion of fluorescent. She drinks him in … in his becoming flecks of grey, in his receding hairline, in his frustration of getting somewhere, in his cascading bursts of smoky autumn breath.

And in that very moment, he looks at her, casually in a travelling glance. He looks away. But a blow of nostalgia strikes across his face and his eyes find her again in a raging agony of reconnaissance.

Their eyes meet and hold each other there. Twelve feet away. Strangers pass by in a blur.

The corners of his eyes wrinkle up to seat a warm, half-moon smile. He waves at her. He calls her name.

But she is frozen, unable to close that distance in time. Her mind is teetering to look past this moment into sweet oblivion or to amble through lanes of her past in search of him.

Just then, a wind sweeps across her face…ruffling all her unruly hair to veil her eyes. The train passes by snorting noisily in her ears, a yelping plea to awaken her. To feel this moment.

In its cacophonous haze, she stands there, transfixed by him.

And carried away in a wind of time, she recalls his soothing touch. His ode to her beauty. His careless whispers. Fast Car playing in the background. Drives in the twilight. Walks on a stranded road. Late-night calls that run through the fresh of dawn. Call-waiting. Waiting.

Sharp pangs of isolation. Of indifference. Of belittling words. Of hurried apologies. Of broken promises. Of peachy lies.

She tries to feel him in this moment as she felt him what seemed to her a lifetime ago. There’s a low stirring in her soul, a restlessness to get some place else. The train is now tugging slowly, as its motors brace to come to a stop next to her. Hurried passengers jostle against her in infuriation, in vain attempt to thrust her into motion.

And yet they stand still, in no man’s land, with no intention of closing the distance or going anywhere else. Words fail to fill up a trivial discourse. She looks at him; he’s locked out of the empress of her heart long-hardened to his ways — a heart that was once all his. She is filled with an inexplicable terror of how vulnerable she used to be to his orchestrated manipulations.

The train pulls to a stop.

For a brief moment, the space between them is shrunken small as the passengers empty the subway to embark on their mundane life expeditions.

The lull of that moment fills her with an anguish of silence withheld for years. She’s standing on the edge. She can’t see the ground below.

And finally she awakens. She catches her breath as she amps up her feet, in backward motion, with a rising urge to break free. She sprints away from him, running as fast as she can; so fast that she sets the path between them ablaze. Tears stream down her face but she runs headlong through her daze.

Is she running away from him? Is she running towards a new dawn? Is she setting herself free?

I cannot say.