By: Isabel del Rio 

Trains are just too true, their smell too real, their actions wholesome. More so the old train before my eyes, possibly about to retire to the local railway museum, perhaps on its last journey. At ten to six so many people filled every crevice in the platform, and then five minutes later there was not a soul except for me thinking only this: “Not much time but it has to be enough!”
I ran for it with so much delight that my face must have betrayed my intention, for no one stopped me at the barrier nor demanded a ticket. They probably believed this was some great undertaking which required my attendance or else.
“Or else what?”, I asked myself, but could not bring myself to answer.
It was not the setting I had wanted for that stellar moment: the old Central Station, hardly used now except for day trips to the Moors, the regular post train, the odd shuttle. But then who gets to choose the place to do things, let alone the time. Yes, this was the time to say, finally, what I wished to say to whom I desired.
I hurried along the platform. The old train was more than ready for its hardly perilous journey. I shuddered as if in the presence of a giant organism pulsating with life, but I felt all the more dead for it.
Another hesitation?
My white dress was quickly sprinkled with soot and my shoes turned dusty. My open mouth attempting to pump extra air in my lungs for all that running was by now sore and harsh. I needed all my strength if it was to be my defining moment.
This was me, a woman of thirty five, in a sooty dress, with dirty shoes, running alongside a train which was breaking into dissonant chords and asymmetric puffs of smoke. Nothing seemed balanced any more, but perhaps I anticipated that my own world was about to turn upside down. And as I ran towards the end of the train I saw a human head out of one of the windows. Was it the one I so much desired?
“Hello!”, I screamed.
I shook my arms to state who I was, I even skipped to reach my destination quicker. The head in the distance looked in my direction. Two hands emulated mine, a faint hello responded to what I said. It could only be him.
“Victor!”, I shouted in absolute delight.
The train was swelling. Out of pride, of urgency, of a sense of making me smaller, who could say. I skipped so much that I even turned and did a little pirouette on the platform, and why not, since this was the day for performing feats. Was that not what I was about to do… abandon all for him?
I could see him distinctly now. He too was smiling and coughing all that distance away. The smoke was too much for both us, alone as we were, it seemed, in that empty station with only a train for company. His lips moved and I lipread him in the distance.
“Yes, yes, it's me, Victor, it's me!”, I responded.
He was just a wagon away. The only living things in that setting seemed the blob of his blonde hair under a hat and the pink skin of his cheeks (too baby pink perhaps as compared to the grey restraint of a train?). And then as I approached my final destination I felt him further and further up on the train, and I so very low. When I briefly stopped, still some distance to go, he removed his hat and I my scarf. I slowly walked the last few metres of the stretch, never taking my eyes off him.
I reminded myself that perhaps I was making a big thing out of all this, since he was not really going further than five or six stops. But the question to ask was if I would I go far with him. I heard the whistle blow once more and for the last lap I was prompted to run again to where he was.
“I'm here, I'm here… ”, I shouted exultantly when I reached him.
“But…”, he said, still smiling.
I took a deep breath, but there was no air, only smoke. The smell was now stench, the heat coming from the train merciless.
“I needed to be here so that we…”
“Yes…?”
“So that we say what we think…”
He was so far up, as if on a higher plain. On my part, I was lower, more down to earth, closer to what things were about and to what was going on below. No, up there he could not feel the engine's thrust and the trueness of the train. He was up there and I was down here, and such were our unshakeable positions.
“How… how does it feel to be up there?”, I asked, but that was not the question I had prepared.
Instead I wanted to say something else, about hopes and even dreams.
“It's pretty cool up here!”, he said smiling, and somehow I had expected him to say something like that.
His smile became too broad, his tone too hasty. He looked at me with welcoming eyes, but they scrutinised too much, even judged. Had I not noticed that before?
“I… I wanted to say goodbye!”, I shouted at the top of my voice, over and above the whistle blowing again.
A look of relief overshadowed his smile. He sighed, frowned, laughed. But he was certainly not amused, even looked as if nothing in the world would ever content him.
Had I not noticed that before either?
“But I thought…”, he said, as if he could not help himself.
I sighed and laughed at the same time, since I also felt relief.
“I thought so too…”
“So?”, he asked.
I turned my head one way and the other, for a moment not knowing what to do.
“It was not to be!”, I screamed without looking at him.
As I walked back the train began to move, and other windows in other wagons opened spontaneously and people showed me their smiling heads, as happy to leave as I was to stay. Somehow those other people did not seem as mighty as Victor, up in their high places. The train gained momentum and the vast wheels started to turn quicker and quicker, the puffs of smoke heaped more soot on my now shattered dress, but I was all the happier for it.
“The six o'clock train is leaving Platform Four”, say the megaphone voice.
I could not help looking back. I could still see him from this distance, with both arms waiving goodbye.
I too waived back, but it was meant for the train and all its passengers, for every one of them and not for anyone in particular. I stayed there until the train was one small dot in the horizon and Victor a dot on the dot, just like the hundreds of black specks on my dress.
“The dot on the dot…”, I said and laughed.
I stretched my arms, still my scarf in my hand. Using it like a whip I violently pounded my dress. The grey dust enveloped me for a moment or two, and the folds of silk very nearly recovered their old true shade. Trains, it seems, have a strange way of telling us the truth.