This Is The Day
Kellyann Ye
This is the day she loses him.
The train clatters out of the station on shining tracks to a shining city seven hours away – seven lightyears away for all she will be able to follow it, the steam from its exit billowing up behind it and obscuring the clock faces welded onto the station nameplates.
Even so, she knows she will remember this moment forever, or at least, for long enough that she will forget a time when this moment didn’t haunt her, and that will be almost the same thing.
Seven twenty-three in the morning, on a crowded station platform in the middle of the city, lost in the smoke and sound of the train pulling out even though there is no way the train can be louder than the roar of the milling crowd.
This is the day he disappears from her life and tears a sizable chunk of her out with him.
She knows it’s seven twenty-two because the train stopped boarding at seven eighteen and her ticket swiped through the turnstile at seven twenty.
“Hey, write me, yeah?”
A brief hesitation, where she isn’t quite sure she heard him right, then, “Of course.”
He flashes her that slant of a smile, the one that first made her look at him across a crowded room for the second time, the one that made her introduce herself to him at the afterparty, the one that she said yes to when he asked her to lunch.
“You’ll write back, right?” she asks, despite herself, because there’s still a tiny, desperate part of her that’s afraid he won’t.
“Always,” he says, and then he’s on the train and gone.
She doesn’t write him letters, in the end.
She doesn’t write him because that never happened. They were never the people to write each other letters, never the sort that really talked. But they’d gone to lunch together once, and she keeps finding herself glancing over at him when he enters a room, keeps catching him sneaking looks at her when she leaves.
What happens, that first day, is this:
She wakes up on the fourteenth of June at precisely seven and falls out of bed with the blankets tangled around her legs and her alarm clock silent and fear beating a frantic tattoo against the inside of her chest. It doesn’t matter the year, because from here on out this will happen every year, every single fourteenth of June until she dies or forgets the signifigance of this date, and honestly the first is more likely.
Up until the night before she wasn’t going to do anything, but then she thinks, forces herself to properly think about how life would be like without him, and finds it a more than a little bit unbearable. So she tears out of bed to the train station, elbows her way to the front of the line shouting something about true love, because even if it’s not that – and it isn’t, she knows it’s not, even if she believed in love she knows that’s not what this is – somehow she doesn’t think she’d know how to go about her life without him in it.
And miracuously the line parts and she gets a ticket and doesn’t check the time because that would just waste precious seconds and no matter what, what happens happens, and hopefully for a reason.
She’s never wanted to believe that more.
Her heart is rising in her chest, beating so hard it hurts, and she’s never felt like this before, so alive, so certain that for once the universe will work out however she wants it to because even if she doesn’t know what she wants to happen, some higher power must know, because nothing’s worked out for her before, and if just this once whatever happens would make her happy, then she’ll stop sniping about it for the rest of her life.
But she bursts out of the row of turnstiles onto the station platform just too late, just as smoke and steam burst up in a cloud from the tracks and the train squeals away in a shower of sparks like a lightning storm.
And suddenly everything goes grey, melodramatically, like when you’ve been staring up at the sun with your eyes closed for too long, and when you open your eyes again it seems like a cloud’s passed over the sun even though it hasn’t.
Except she hasn’t blinked, won’t blink, because blinking would erase the image she has of him in his coat and scarf despite the heat pulling himself up the stairs to the train car with the handrail so he could go faster, because nothing’s ever fast enough for him, pulling himself inside and disappearing forever.
And in a film the soundtrack would change here (in a film the girl would get the guy and it would turn out that they were meant for each other all along) but in a film the cacophany of the station would die down until all the audience could hear would be the sombre, slowing pulse of her heart and the rising pitch of the train leaving.
But this isn’t a film, and the train leaves, and suddenly she can barely hear it over the hubbub of the the crowd and she’s never hated large groups of people so much before, because somehow it seems like if she could only hang on to the sound of his train leaving she’d have a chance of hanging onto him.
Except she doesn’t, because the noise of the crowd and the surrounding conversations are drowning out the noise of the train, erasing it from her memory as fast as it arrived, and she almost cries but doesn’t at the last moment, because she’s lost something important, but by god her dignity isn’t going to go with it.
She stands on the station platform for the rest of the day, numb, her hands langing loosely at her sides and sweat staining the back of her t-shirt, staring at the exit of the station, never turning her head even as trains pull in and she is jostled from side to side by passengers embarking and disembarking.
When the announcement for the last train of the night comes, she watches it go in her unfocused vision and then walks alone out of the swinging station doors.
Kellyann Ye
This is the day she loses him.
The train clatters out of the station on shining tracks to a shining city seven hours away – seven lightyears away for all she will be able to follow it, the steam from its exit billowing up behind it and obscuring the clock faces welded onto the station nameplates.
Even so, she knows she will remember this moment forever, or at least, for long enough that she will forget a time when this moment didn’t haunt her, and that will be almost the same thing.
Seven twenty-three in the morning, on a crowded station platform in the middle of the city, lost in the smoke and sound of the train pulling out even though there is no way the train can be louder than the roar of the milling crowd.
This is the day he disappears from her life and tears a sizable chunk of her out with him.
She knows it’s seven twenty-two because the train stopped boarding at seven eighteen and her ticket swiped through the turnstile at seven twenty.
“Hey, write me, yeah?”
A brief hesitation, where she isn’t quite sure she heard him right, then, “Of course.”
He flashes her that slant of a smile, the one that first made her look at him across a crowded room for the second time, the one that made her introduce herself to him at the afterparty, the one that she said yes to when he asked her to lunch.
“You’ll write back, right?” she asks, despite herself, because there’s still a tiny, desperate part of her that’s afraid he won’t.
“Always,” he says, and then he’s on the train and gone.
She doesn’t write him letters, in the end.
She doesn’t write him because that never happened. They were never the people to write each other letters, never the sort that really talked. But they’d gone to lunch together once, and she keeps finding herself glancing over at him when he enters a room, keeps catching him sneaking looks at her when she leaves.
What happens, that first day, is this:
She wakes up on the fourteenth of June at precisely seven and falls out of bed with the blankets tangled around her legs and her alarm clock silent and fear beating a frantic tattoo against the inside of her chest. It doesn’t matter the year, because from here on out this will happen every year, every single fourteenth of June until she dies or forgets the signifigance of this date, and honestly the first is more likely.
Up until the night before she wasn’t going to do anything, but then she thinks, forces herself to properly think about how life would be like without him, and finds it a more than a little bit unbearable. So she tears out of bed to the train station, elbows her way to the front of the line shouting something about true love, because even if it’s not that – and it isn’t, she knows it’s not, even if she believed in love she knows that’s not what this is – somehow she doesn’t think she’d know how to go about her life without him in it.
And miracuously the line parts and she gets a ticket and doesn’t check the time because that would just waste precious seconds and no matter what, what happens happens, and hopefully for a reason.
She’s never wanted to believe that more.
Her heart is rising in her chest, beating so hard it hurts, and she’s never felt like this before, so alive, so certain that for once the universe will work out however she wants it to because even if she doesn’t know what she wants to happen, some higher power must know, because nothing’s worked out for her before, and if just this once whatever happens would make her happy, then she’ll stop sniping about it for the rest of her life.
But she bursts out of the row of turnstiles onto the station platform just too late, just as smoke and steam burst up in a cloud from the tracks and the train squeals away in a shower of sparks like a lightning storm.
And suddenly everything goes grey, melodramatically, like when you’ve been staring up at the sun with your eyes closed for too long, and when you open your eyes again it seems like a cloud’s passed over the sun even though it hasn’t.
Except she hasn’t blinked, won’t blink, because blinking would erase the image she has of him in his coat and scarf despite the heat pulling himself up the stairs to the train car with the handrail so he could go faster, because nothing’s ever fast enough for him, pulling himself inside and disappearing forever.
And in a film the soundtrack would change here (in a film the girl would get the guy and it would turn out that they were meant for each other all along) but in a film the cacophany of the station would die down until all the audience could hear would be the sombre, slowing pulse of her heart and the rising pitch of the train leaving.
But this isn’t a film, and the train leaves, and suddenly she can barely hear it over the hubbub of the the crowd and she’s never hated large groups of people so much before, because somehow it seems like if she could only hang on to the sound of his train leaving she’d have a chance of hanging onto him.
Except she doesn’t, because the noise of the crowd and the surrounding conversations are drowning out the noise of the train, erasing it from her memory as fast as it arrived, and she almost cries but doesn’t at the last moment, because she’s lost something important, but by god her dignity isn’t going to go with it.
She stands on the station platform for the rest of the day, numb, her hands langing loosely at her sides and sweat staining the back of her t-shirt, staring at the exit of the station, never turning her head even as trains pull in and she is jostled from side to side by passengers embarking and disembarking.
When the announcement for the last train of the night comes, she watches it go in her unfocused vision and then walks alone out of the swinging station doors.