I get the train from Penn Station. A friend takes me there. I’ve been staying at her place the past few days, we had a date the night before (Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, doing a rather brilliant – if, yes, slightly too long – new piece about… well, about everything that NATO likes to do shows about, um, sure, yeah), she’s the person I’m going to miss the most when I leave and…
The question is raised. Is the experience of missing someone, or of preparing to miss someone, is this a function of being afraid of whatever the next moment is (foreign country, grad school), or simply a genuine emotional reaction of commitment, attachment and loss? (Are there even such things as genuine emotional reactions?) And I don’t know. My friend, she turns to me at one point and says “it will be okay”, and I don’t really know what either of us is referring to.
But I get overwhelmed by emotion. And I think too much. So.
We made each other mix CDs. I gave her books, a DVD of pirated movies. Things to remember each other by. Because, the truth is I usually forget people. And perhaps that is what missing, or preparing to miss, really is. A way to make a bruise that will serve as a reminder.
She takes me to the station. We don’t talk too much. She puts me on the train, and we stand there, in the bowels of Penn Station, and waited. For what, I don’t know. For nothing.
A minute passes. And it is time.
I sit there alone, look out the window, it’s tinted and dirty, hard to look through, but I see her on the other side, waving, waving at a train that isn’t moving yet, as she disappears from my view, and perhaps the other way as well.
And then train really is moving, and suddenly – a smile on my face. I do so love to be in transit, going somewhere new. And for awhile, as I go to the airport – yes, nothing but myself.
The last moment, as the train begins to pull out of Penn Station, and I put her on, not her mix for me, but my mix for her. Because, her mix for me is what she wants me to take, but my mix for her is what I want to remember. Everything I feel, it’s in the mix. I’m saving hers for later; I want to exhaust mine.
And as the train pulls away, a song plays. Something dreamy, half-whispered, almost like a dream.
We’re sleeping underneath the plastic trees
Turn off the sun, the wax fruit tastes lovely,
We ride the waves of simulated surf,
We make love on the fresh cut Astroturf
Memorize bliss,
Free as the day,
See right through me,
Like an X-Ray.
