Connection - Subway Girl

Connection - Subway Girl

I stand with eyes closed, and the ripple play of a violin etches its way through my body.  I can feel rhythms from the top of my head down through to the soles of my feet.  Again, again.  Rhythmic and motion, a push and pull.  The casual grip of fingers through touch-less gloves as the ebb and twist of the subway cars bounce me like a bow string, legs bend and straighten, and my weight drifts on the flowing river of steel.  I am no longer he who is remembered, but a force of nature.

My mind slips away.



A woman sits opposite me, an open book hangs before her nose, eyes flick from line to line across words and page.  1984.  A tiny nose stud, a patterned cap and a chequed long skirt.  Her adorned nails peek out from peeled back mittens too.  A lock of black hair drifts down into her eyes, she puffs once, twice to push it away.

His head twists ever so slightly, studying the back of the jacket cover before his eyes slide away again, drifting with the music.

She glances at him, and her eyes linger too long while he gazelessly sees steel and motion, a rush of the world that goes too fast.  But she lingers too long.  His eyes slide back, amber brown into her green and grey ones.  Time stops as he watches her, and she looks back defiantly, then her mouth quirks in a half smile before the orbs dart back down to the lines of words across the page.  He smirks, but does not look away.

Does he remember her?  Some lost kinship, some moment long past and gone?  There is the subtle pull in his chest but it could be the inertia.  He closes his eyes, and imagines the myriad spiral of lives and moments that have taken him to all the places.  All the people.  All the things and all the parts, a breath here, a glance here, a brush of time and space as the pathways of lines through time and space.

Have they met?

The lines diverge, he traces them like a web until they cascade into waves, rising and cresting against one another.

Another instant, a second passes, and stellar drift turns him from the place he once was to somewhere else.

He knows.

He blinks his eyes open, and suddenly she is right in front of him.  Her book is clutched in cold fingers, down by her side.

She leans in and for another breathless instant they are somewhere else, long ago.

"Sanity is not statistical."

Her voice is a kind of ancient music, and his eyes go wide.  It twists at him, punches through the play of violin and agelessness that obfuscates his head.  It is as though his face crests the top of the ocean and he takes one great lungful of air.  She sits while he blinks, her book out again before anyone has seen the moment, her nose is buried in it once more and heedless of him.

He submerges again, the push of the subway comes to a halt and his balance naturally shifts, he turns, twisting with a feral grace, fingers extended, boots slide against the polished floor.

Headphones slide down his neck, he pushes them back and leans down over her, lips far enough away from her to not draw attention, but to speak without sound for her alone, as though only the feeling of warmth from him is enough to communicate.

"We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness."

He slides backwards, black cloak flares and dances a shadow dance around his shoulders, settling into the more recognizable longcoat of black that is more well understood.  She blinks, frozen, mid-word.  Then her eyes take him in, really take him in this time.  And she knows.

She rises, hesitant, unsure.  "Who are you?"

But he slides backwards out the door, which shuts itself before her eyes.  She takes two halting steps forward, touches the plastic-plexi between them, and another timeless moment stretches between them.

Then he backs away, the cloak shifts again and darkness folds him in its chill embrace, he disappears from sight amongst the crowds twisting and turning.  He becomes someone else, and then someone else again, before he drops wolflike and leaps the turnstyle, slipping into the night.

She watches him vanish, a wordless longing as the train whisks her away.