#60
4.
As some days passed, I realized and discovered a few things about myself and about the city. It was my first time in London, and although I have traveled before and understood things like public transport, buses, and getting around, I still found myself surrounded by the unknown.
The first day I was going to the office I took the tube at Parson’s Green. It was 8.30AM and as the train pulled up to a very full platform, I realized that this was going to be a very difficult journey. All the cars were stuffed in no particular way, of people.
Inside the sweltering carriage, sweat poured down the faces of men and women. A baby cried on the other side, people balanced a phone in one hand, texting or writing emails, and the morning commuter paper in the other. Silence permeated the car, except for the baby’s cry. No one was in conversation, no one on the phone, no eye contact, no humans really on board here. Some of the men’s hair was so piled with gel that it’s hard to tell if it is hair gel or sweat, their body weight would suggest the latter.
The smell of a thousand raised arms on a hot summer morning in London, what a sight.
The District is the green line on the map and the line I am relegated to take to and from work. A confusing one with 3 or 4 end stations all passing through one main station called Earl’s Court.
As everyone else, I remain quiet on the tube. Mostly because I don’t know anybody. It gives me a chance to dream and remember moment of the past, of time lost to the world. I don’t have any amazing stories of long lost loves to cry-over or a dead dog. No real tragedies in my life, it’s just that things happen that should. You take each day as it comes and don’t look too far ahead.
She comes to mind then. In these moments of nostalgic reflection. A woman that I do not know, nor have ever met, but whose image is somehow flashed before my eyes. Lost in this mellow thought, drowning in empathetic lust, mushy brain, sweaty underarms, stop by stop, people come and go, in and out of the car and my mind is like it’s surrounded by a cloud.
This longing.
Scanning a room, a park, a shopping center. The one whom for my garden is grown, my words spoken, my actions directed towards. She mystifies me, this specter of my imagination. This lady of my mind. It is not an idea that comes to mind so easily, so quickly, but one I have to forcefully pull from the inner most trenches of my brain. Screaming as I do it, because sometimes the angst of feeling so severely alone, with just an apparition to look out for paralyzes me. On the tube it is prompted by my observations of some of the saddest most melancholy faces on the planet. People who gave in long ago to the grey middle. Those poor suckers activate this metamorphosis of chemicals and I can’t help but think of her.