FICTION
A young man is standing at railroad station and anxiously awaiting on the arrival of the train he is scheduled to be on.
As he looks around he marvels at the clean aluminum that the entire station is built and designed with. The roof and pillars are all a matte grey that still has a bit of reflectance to it.
His father told him that train stations used to be noisy places back when the trains ran on fossil fuel. Nowadays, the mechanism for making a train move is a mixture of electric motors and magnetic tracks that cause the trains to move nearly silently across the tracks. Instead of puffing engines the soundscape is filled with the subtle sounds that couldn’t have been heard in the past such as the wheels of a skateboard a few blocks away.
The innovation for this to be possible happened after the great awakening, when the entire population realized how they could utilize the environment they lived in to generate electricity and power became virtually free.
A cold breeze hits the young man’s face. It’s a fall day and he always feels down in the fall, as if he can feel the entire cycle of life that repeats each year slowing down as the air gets colder and the leaves on the trees simultaneously die.
he thinks about it, lost in his head
“why cant the air get warmer when the leaves fall and when the leaves grow it gets colder?”
“that way the mood throughout the year would be more even!” Someone that sounds near him says, sounding exited at the idea
He’s startled and quickly turns toward the voice, it sounded like it came from a female
“Who was that?!” the young man exclaims, moderately loudly
He turns, only to see a deserted scene filled with aluminum pillars, a few people far away going in and out of the train station’s cafe.
He turns back towards looking at the train tracks and once again gets lost in his head.
The reason he’s anxious is that he doesn’t know if he’s going to be able to get the client he is traveling to meet a high quality product.
Typically he took planes but wanted the longer train ride to edit some footage on his computer, and apparently you don’t need to be two hours early for a train as you do at an airport.
He’s been trying to start his own business that’s based around video production. However, he’s more passionate about the editing side. One of the reasons for this is that shooting video is more stressful, you only get one chance to get it right. When you’re editing it’s easier to get immersed in the technical side, (his favorite part) as there’s no stress about failure. You get unlimited undos by hitting a simple keystroke.
He got hired for his first big job, one that he’ll get paid multiple months of rent for with the way he currently lives.
But, before editing the video he needs to go out and acquire the footage.
A young women is on her way to the train station. She just got done talking to an old friend. The friend has been going through a traumatic emotional period in his life, although this traumatic period seems constant ever since she has know him.
Nevertheless, she’s in her mid-twenties, and without children of her own her kind heart and gentle nature has gotten diverted from her own nonexistent offspring to a handful of friends that don’t possess the same mental stability and clarity she does.
She calmly goes about her days, successfully managing a small business owned by someone else and clicking away late into the night on the computer programming drums over soaring edm melodies.
She’s going on a trip to the capital city to meet with a record label and while she usually flies when going out of town, she felt compelled to buy a train ticket after seeing a beautiful photo on Instagram.
It almost felt as if she was being nudged by someone to buy the train ticket.
She’s been praying more than she used to but doesn’t often ask for anything for herself.
Actually, it was suggested to her to pray for a companion and she felt a little ridiculous asking God for something. While she often prays for her friends and asks God to help them at solving their problems she never asks for anything to satiate her own loneliness.
She doesn’t necessarily feel lonely as she’s surrounded by people who care about her deeply.
However, she thinks clearly enough to understand how biological clocks work for a female and how this plays into finding a partner, which she has pushed the feeling of away, but still remembers often.
Nevertheless, she calmly goes about her days and follows her routine. Appreciating her animals, feeling good about helping her friends, and being successful at her job & financially.
She dreams of getting signed at a record label, for the security that having this type of a career in music could provide.
But what she fails to see that in this scenario the record label would be taking the place of a man in her life, in providing her security & direction, minus the love and family.
She got to the train station much earlier than needed as she was hoping to explore the train before it left the station. However, upon noticing the train wasn’t yet at the station decided to get a coffee. She was planning on making music on her laptop during the ride so the caffeine would be artistic fuel.
She walks out of the coffee shop and looks up at the overhang in the train station.
It’s a massive vault to block the rain and provide some shade that’s made up of intricate matte silver metal beams. They glow without being glossy.
As she walks toward her train platform she looks up and marvels at the architecture, even holding her arms out and spinning around once, although blushing and feeling cheesy & embarrassed after doing something so childish, despite the fact nobody was watching anyways.
As she was looking up at the beams her phone rang, she stopped and looked at the screen, seeing it was her friend she felt a small wave of exhaustion fall over her thinking of their last conversation. Despite this, she answered the phone and started listening to his circular emotions.
As the young man is spaced out and thinking about the next day he suddenly feels the presence of someone else near him. He turns and sees a women about his age walk out from between the metal beams.
She’s on the phone, since the train station is so quiet he can’t help but hear her conversation although he typically tries to mind his own business while in public. It sounds like she’s comforting someone who’s going through a rough time. In his head the young man marvels at how calm her voice sounds, how clearly she’s talking the person on the other line through their struggles, and… .. .. is that the voice he heard earlier?
He thinks for a few minutes while listening to her speak over the phone, analyzing not what she’s saying but the sound of it, concluding that it definitely was the same voice.
He goes back and forth in his head about if he should talk to her, what to say first, how embarrassing it might be to approach her and accidentally creep her out. However, for some reason he felt he needed to and remembered something his grandfather had explained to him, that if you meet the person who really is the right person for you, you don’t need to try, you can let your guard down and be yourself & everything will flow naturally without the need for attempting to impress or putting on a mask.
So, he listened to her phone conversation wind down, amazed by how she seemed to need to say the same thing 10x to the person she was speaking to for them to move on and amazed by how patient and stable she acted throughout the whole process. As he listened to her speak more and more people began to arrive and wait for the train.
As the phone conversation she was in ended he had put himself in a spot to be able to naturally approach her. He got close to her as people began to form lines to board the train. As the young man and women got into the line he was close enough to her to speak.
“Would you want to sit togeather?”
“I dreamed about this conversation last night” she said, looking at him shocked.