Train Station

My marshmallows melt, oozing into my coffee.

Coffee? Don’t you mean hot chocolate?

No, coffee. If I’d meant hot chocolate I’d have said ‘hotcho’.

There aren’t stars in my eyes, just specks of dust. Realistic, irritating, infuriating specks of dust that are incredibly real.

The sparkle walked out a year or two ago; we weren’t seeing eye-to-eye.

The man across the tracks reads the paper and has the forehead of a teacher I once learnt from. English, British he was, from Yorkshire.

I listen to a girl with confidence and faith and motivation sing through my headphones, allowing her qualities to take me over (hopefully) and to add happiness to my life.

Loose t-shirt walks past; she has a Tim Minchin canvas bag hanging from one shoulder while she the other is used to hold her violin case.

I wonder vaguely whether she’s a musical genius and I’ve just missed an opportunity to speak with such a being.

There’s a young woman in red sitting by the man across the tracks now, on the same bench-seat.

The lit-up sign says the train is three minutes from arriving. I stand up and walk to the end of the platform in preparation. It arrives and I board.

I sit down across from a boy (man? He looks more like a boy) who is listening to his iPod and staring at me incredibly uncomfortably.

Avoiding eye contact is the only way I can think of to let him know his attention is unwanted.

There is a man sitting a few seats down from me who looks almost exactly like a boy I used to have a dancing class with. He’d worn long black coats and boots- he would have frightened me if I hadn’t seen how sweet he was to everyone.

He may have been Spanish or something similar, ‘Lorenzo’. Intriguing.

He was kind to me even though I barely spoke a word to anyone at that time in life, stifled by self-conscious shyness. I always appreciated the people whom didn’t dismiss me because of how shy I was or how little I found myself able to interact.

The man on the train though, isn’t him. He doesn’t have as soft a face and he’s nowhere near as tall.

Sometimes I write in large capitals ‘I HATE PEOPLE READING OVER MY SHOULDER’ when I’m writing on the train because I’m very aware of others and paranoid of their reading what I write. Probably a self-obsessed un-justified paranoia but what can you do? I guess my ego is just that big.