it was a short train ride. nothing had ever been shorter than that train ride. it seemed like two minutes of my life consuming ten years. i inhaled in every last second of it, every last scent of him, every last bit of his smile and his laugh and his words and his hands around mine, even the little candy wrappers he would leave in my pockets just because.

i imagined every last word with him, every phrase he said, each poetic line he conjured just for me, each word of consolation, each gentle touch.

i spent much of those thirty minutes—the last minutes of our last train ride—just zooming through our memories—the parks, the museums, the libraries, the car rides.

and the train rides.

it would be our last.

 

he always loved trains, he did. every time we would go somewhere he always insisted on going by train.

"it’s kind of like life. you can choose not to follow, but it goes on. you can get on it, and you can get somewhere. sometimes you don’t know where you’re going and you just get on for the heck of it."

he was like that, saying little snippets of his observations and his wisdoms. wisdoms. it was plural. that much.

this time, though, we knew where we were going. it wasn’t a “train date,” as i used to call it. we had a set destination. it was home. the last ride together.

would it be?

i didn’t know; and i dared not ask.

he was quiet, too. i wondered if he was thinking the same thing.

i realized i was holding his hand tightly, almost desperately. he was holding mine, too. my left arm was leaning against his right arm, joined together by the static of our sweaters. he liked sweaters. comfortable. “don’t fake yourself to look better for me,” he’d say. “you’re perfect without makeup, without dressing up, without any concealer—the figurative sort.”

he said things like that. they were real, raw, honest. and it touched my heart, it did.

we must have looked pretty melancholy, because at the next stop a woman looked at us together and decided to sit all the way across the aisle, even though there were only a few seats left and ours was the closest to the door.

i guess we were melancholy.

it was after fifteen minutes, which felt like a fleeting three seconds, that i finally found my voice.

"will i see you?" i asked quietly.

he just smoothed his thumb over the back of my hand, drawing imaginary circles, saying nothing.

"i don’t know," he said after forever.

it was a bunch of forevers and nevers and instants all squeezed into those thirty minutes.

"but i love you," he whispered. he didn’t stop smoothing the back of my hand.

i feared after he left he would never return the same; that he would become one of those far-off stars that you could only look at, observe longingly, but know you would never, ever reach—not in this life. it was even more heartbreaking because at one point he had been a sweet memory, a sweet candy in my bitter life. now he was a star. a far off star, gazing down on me but still tantalizingly out of reach.

he had promised he would remember me, that he would write me, that he would somehow meet me secretly even between his busy schedules. he had promised a million things, a billion things, that he would write songs for me, that he would always think of me. it was almost as if he himself never truly believed it would happen. it was too burdensome a promise to swear to do all of that. it was.

and yet now here we were, unable to meet for whatever, however long it may be, because of his future, his dreams. i dared not ask him to choose between his love and his dreams, because i knew how much he had passion for his dreams. i knew how much it ached. how much he craved. how much he wanted.

he had had memories with me, he had had the sweet love and the light kisses and surprise sandwiches and midnight outings. but he hadn’t had the blazing fire of passion for dancing on stage, with his own audience, with his own music. and i could feel, every day, that longing passion radiating from him. i knew he wanted it. so i couldn’t ask him to choose.

deep inside, i did. i truly did. i wanted to scream and ask him to give up his dreams for his only love, to remember his promises to me on that starlit lawn that saturday when he had asked me at 12:03 am to come outside to the park we went to so often; when he gave me a flower and then kissed me and told me how much he loved me and that he was scared of the future and the past and the present but that he was living through it just like everybody else; that he knew that i was always there for him and that he would always be there for me. i held onto those memories dearly, like his leaving would suddenly make them let loose and free and soon gone.

all of this. in the train.

he hadn’t said much, but his thumb said more, and the silence spoke thousands. any words said on the train were meaningless; it was the memories before that we held onto, not the last train ride, and we both knew this.

the train stopped, and the doors slid open, and suddenly everything took hours, days, years to pass—those fleeting three seconds suddenly segued into years just to get to the doors, just to get onto the platform, just to look into his eyes, just to hug him—

it was years, years of slow motion of the embrace and a little bit of tears and then the departing. i went one way, he went the other, and neither of us dared to look back.