Three Shorts
In the evening, I'm sitting on an oval, polished-wood seat inside the Laurier station. The mechanically polite automated voice on the PA system repeats calmly every few minutes that the service on the orange line is interrupted due to a technical problem. (Wait patiently. Don't panic. Is this what it means?). There are about three people on this side of the tracks, maybe two on the other; late-night travellers caught in an infrastructural glitch, resigned to an inevitable delay. Suddenly, from beyond our field of vision comes a series of strange, almost inhuman sounds, emitted at regular intervals and growing louder. Quick exchange of puzzled glances, then silence, then it starts again, and she appears on top of the stairs on the Côte-Vertu side. She walks slowly down the stairs and, entirely lost to where and when she is, keeps a straight line towards the seats half-way down the platform. With a frightening regularity a sharp, animal-like wailing sound is ripped right out of her lungs. She slumps down on a seat, her body a desolate lump, her eyes two black cavities from where I'm sitting, across the tracks. Time passes in silence and inefficiency, interrupted by her resonant moans issuing from a bottomless sadness. She looks like a hurting animal, innocent in utter helplessness and completely unaware. A few more people enter the platforms on both sides, and almost immediately attempt to identify unobtrusively the source of wailing; those on her side stay away from the seats and try not to look at her. Finally, the automated lady in the loudspeakers announces the recommencement of the service, and even before she finishes, the Côte-Vertu train booms into the station. Everyone gets on, the doors close, and the train pushes on, carrying an unspeakable burden of a human soul beaten and crushed.
(Wait patiently. Don't panic.)
Jarry
The ride from Laurier to Jarry on a late-night train takes about 5 minutes. By now I'm tired and am sitting, pleasantly drugged into a state of rocking-induced numbness. Across and to my right sits a middle-aged Asian man in a blue denim jacket with cut off sleeves. He has a small moustache and somewhat dishevelled hair. His bare arms are streaked with protruding blue veins; there's an end or a beginning of a tattoo close to his right wrist but his arm position makes it impossible for me to see it all. At Jarry we both stand up to get off, and I catch a glimpse of his tattoo: on the soft inside of the wrist, where you would normally take your pulse, the simple unembellished letters Own me are written.
And at that moment, for entirely unclear reasons, I quite like it.
3 Comments:
very nice, I quite like it.
I was intrigued by that dance of looks with that middle aged man, what did he want?
and could we expect Tijana with a Tatto that reads "Own me" in the near future? hahaha
Nice entry!
What did he want? To buy me a candy, have me sit on his knee, to read me a story? Beats me... All I know is, it looked like "an indecent proposal" to me, and I reacted to it :-).
No tattoos for me, thanks. But this one was, well, weird but in an unusal way.
The whole day was simply a collage of somewhat "off" (but intriguing) metro experiences :-)...
well... Welcome that to me sounds like what any young gay man in the village would experience in daily basis... which you are not of course hahaha, but hey, you live you learn! :)
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