Today, not a pigeon in sight.
You might think there’s been a hygiene improvement at the station. Yet, the filth is so vast that even a microscope would only reveal what’s already visible to the naked eye. Dirt without a name, from unknown origins, smeared across the stained seats, spreading across the floor like a map of forgotten lands. I dare not invoke the smell—the words deserve at least a little respect. Who dirtied the world? Sure, a station isn’t the world, but no matter how big the world is, it’s merely an abstraction, defined by the small corner we inhabit. The metaphor of love that once burned our lips finds its real-world counterpart in the countless cigarette butts scattered everywhere. I take a few steps, and there, right on the tracks, is a torn 20-euro note, a stark reminder of materialism on its way to an existential wreck.
Who soiled this world of mine?
Then there are the people—like a fashion show of grime, everyone seems to blend with the local trends of dirt. It’s not just physical filth; they wallow in the mental muck of their phones, grinning, blessed by some nauseating gift. They clutch their smartphones like crystal balls, weighed down by images, yet as empty as the real thing. The difference is that those old crystal balls once spurred the imagination.
Fortunately, I have a bit of a writer’s gift, and I ease the wounds of this leprous boredom with some scribbling. Truth in literature, when it’s sincere, emerges like a deep retching from the intestines of the soul.
Suddenly, memories of the storm arise. Reason, in despair, tries to save the boat. Massive waves batter it repeatedly, until reason finally glimpses a virgin, pure, and clean island on the horizon.
Just when I think there’s nothing more to write or observe, something stirs my interest again. A woman next to me is talking on her phone, and I recognize her voice. It’s the same one we hear every day over the station’s loudspeakers. How funny, to stumble upon the human face of the guiding voice of our daily commute. She’s clearly in a hurry; dinner’s not ready, her husband refuses to divorce her, and tomorrow looms large. She’s late. On the other end, her son waits impatiently at the school gate.
“Don’t leave,” she says, “Mom doesn’t know the train schedule.”
I imagine her son wondering how his mother, of all people, doesn’t know when the train’s coming—after all, she just shouted, “Mom doesn’t know the train schedule, okay?!” before hanging up.
Now, she starts speaking for the whole station. Her voice leaps from the loudspeaker, announcing the train’s schedule. Isn’t that how we sound when thinking about things we don’t like? The train is still a long way off, but the owner of the schedule voice seems desperate to drown herself out, so she plugs in her earbuds. But her phone battery dies. Now she’s forced to listen to herself, as if trapped inside her own conscience at this very station. She can’t silence her voice.
She was not interested in other trains, other schedules, other engineers, other passengers, other lives. Being all at the same station, we care about no one else. We look at others convinced that only we exist. The hope that somewhere on a carriage there is a reserved place with our name.
But a reserved place should exist at the station for this gentleman who must have worked so many decades that the next train should take him to the lands of retirement. He looks at the clock and does not see the hours, rather, he sees the trains that have passed in life, the friends who have already left, the trains he never caught, the opportunities he lost; Rosa was a beautiful woman, she still is, but she hasn’t become a widow yet. In other words, does he still wait for that train? His solitary demeanor is that of someone who once truly committed suicide on the railway line and was brought back to this death in which he lives.
He has so little hope of being reborn that he has already lost the desire to kill himself again. It’s just a gradual dying. It seems that time gave him this watch to mock him. It gave him these people to scoff at him. No one ever has time to be with him. And when memories come to him, he realizes that these people have to hurry to the memories of other people and therefore have no time to be with him now. In this waiting for the train, he forgets the name of the guy who once challenged him to a game of billiards; his name was . The watch he wears on his wrist carries more occurrences than all the trains in India lined up. It was a gift from the former boss who had a restaurant serving , or was it Italian? No, it was another boss who gave him this watch, on his birthday, or was it because he had no money to pay him for the overtime? It’s a lie; it was who gave him the watch because of a bet they made in December of . His memories come to him like canceled schedules on a day of strike.
We are all waiting for the train, but what are we really waiting for? Something missing. To everyone’s surprise, even to the schedule lady herself, the train is canceled. Here’s proof that what we say can turn against us, as she’s clearly annoyed by the news. With that, we all disperse, as if we’ve been in a dark world that’s suddenly lit up. We share a common nuisance—taxis, Ubers. Some of us are unsure how to proceed without the train, but we search for a revelation in the grime beneath our feet, some path to follow. Boredom fills us even more. We kick imaginary pigeons. After all, pigeons distract us—that’s why we shoo them away.
As for me, I jump onto the tracks. I’m not alone. We march—a group of us. No, we won’t conform. We want to get somewhere. The more we walk, the more we realize: we are the train we’ve been waiting for. After all, we were waiting for our own decision.
But at some point, I break away from the group, cutting through the underbrush. The ground rises, and from the top, I can see the city and the station. The train has arrived. But no one is there to meet it. Everyone has left. The conductor jumps onto the platform and waits for the only train that truly matters—the train of people.
—–
Image: Copilot remixed