In All The World Only One

I search for a seat away from everyone else, I prefer to be on the top level because the view is better and not so claustrophobic and I figure if the train crashes I’ll have a better chance of being killed by the fall than by falling debris and for some reason I find comfort in that. I get lucky and find an isolated corner. There are two rows of seats that face each other to allow passengers the choice of riding forward or backward. I decide to ride backward, I want to see what I’m leaving behind instead of looking at where I’m about to go, but neither location really holds much interest for me anymore. I get seated just in time, and the train lurches forward, I sit there for a second reading my magazine but I start to get a little motion sick from riding backwards and reading at the same time, so I put the magazine on top of my lap and I don’t pick it back up again for the whole trip, I just sit there starring out the window.

I stare into the glass almost hoping it will hold some secret just for me, some mystery that only the people who choose my seat are privy to, but all I notice is my own vague reflection and the dim glare cast by the lights inside the cabin. I put my hand to the glass almost expecting to find some comfort in its touch, like I’ve mistakenly done with a multitude of men I barely know for so many years, but just like the men all I feel is cold. As I take my hand off the window I look deeper at the glass I see little fingerprints, way too small to belong to an adult. I start obsessively wondering about the child who sat in this seat before me. Where was it going? Who was it with? Did it stand on the seat excitedly and point to the locations whizing by and yell cheerfully oblivious things like “Hi Kitty!,” addressing non-existent felines or did it smush its whole hand and maybe even its face against the glass reveling in its coolness and finding pleasure in the dirty little marks left behind? Or did the child just touch the glass and find only cold, and no comfort like I. Little drops of rain begin to lightly dot the window and as they freckle my vague reflection and the mysterious child’s fingerprints I start to cry.

I start crying so hard that I’m embarrassed even though there’s no one else in the compartment with me. The tears fall quickly down my cheeks and onto my unread magazine and it almost looks like the actress on the cover is crying too. I’d like to think she and I are crying for something worth while, for some greater cosmic tragedy - injustice, hunger, discrimination, war, but I know better. I’m crying for myself. Crying because my life is such a mess, crying because I know I just ruined a perfectly good friendship for absolutely no reason, crying because Los Angeles represents an old life and an old Ann, both of which I’ve grown to hate, consumed by people that drove me crazy in a city now so dead to me I never again wish to call it home. I couldn’t believe how ugly situations got and how quickly they got there, I was wishing, now more than ever, that the glass and the locations beyond it held some answers for me, but crying even harder when I kept remembering they didn’t.

The morning was grey and the scenery was desolate. Relentlessly filthy industrial landscapes lining the tracks, stacks of pallets, dirty boxes, broken machinery, dingy dwellings in desperate need of refurbishing and brightly colored walls adorned by all sorts of paint jobs, but none of them legal. I felt my heart sink into the pit of my stomach, hitting bottom and splashing up another onslaught of tears flooding my eyes. I knew the feeling well, it was the same one I had the last time I met with betrayal, it was the same sickness, the same frail starvation, feeling like my body had been drained of every good emotion, every shred of confidence and in its place an emptiness and a myriad of questions, all beginning with the word why. Why did it go down like this? Why did he tell me this is what he wanted when he didn’t? Why was he not happy about it? Why is this so difficult? Why do I have such bad luck? I felt another wave of illness and I told myself perhaps it was just hunger, knowing full well that it was regret. I knew I had made the same mistake I always make - trying to make other people happy at the risk of my own well being. Perpetually wearing my heart way too close to my sleeve and my cunt way too close to my heart and I knew in the pit of my rapidly sinking stomach that this was the end of the end, there was no lower I could fall, time to finish liking the salt out of my wounds instead of pouring more into them and time to get my life back…one chapter ends and another one begins.