Vonfuse(d) Me

I realised how much I miss travelling today, the first time I was on the rail again since a while ago. I left early in the morning to get to Hamburg on a fast and comfortable train. There I met with Val from Bulgaria and his brother, and spent a lovely day with them. I'll leave out the details now but talk about the way back - going back, again on a fast and comfortable train, it was raining. I sat with my back in the direction we were driving. As Hamburg faded away in the distance and small rain pellets raced alongside the window next to me leaving long glassy streaks, the climatised carriage actually got cold enough to give me in my rain-soaked t-shirt a slight chill. I cuddled myself inside my red fleece jacket, against the seat, listening to The Shins and with moody grey all around me trying to close my eyes. When I openend them again I saw the rainclouds clearly - there weren't many, and they weren't too large. Hovering not too far above the ground. Then kilometres of blue sky - and some more, happy fluffy white clouds. The play they provided when my changing perspective made them move against one another was just another small anecdote on this trip.

When I had arrived back here, and missed my tram by a few strides in my run, I prepared for the seven minutes wait and couldn't help but notice the couple, maybe a few years younger than me both of them, holding one another tight some few metres away. She was holding a beautiful white rose with a very long stem, dangling loosely from her fingers. Soon the tram came and it was time for them to part - I'd be surprised if those weren't tears I saw glinting in their eyes and on their cheeks. As we started moving again, I sat a few metres away to the side across from the girl, who was the one of them to get on the tram. Some small kids across from her were trading Pokemon Playing Cards. All the while she kept staring at the same spot somewhere in mid air, maybe a metre and a half towards the bottom left. But her facial expressions changed every moment. From a grin to a wicked smile, then a small laugh, then a worried look maybe, or anger. Her eyes did not move a bit. The rose was hanging upside down from her folded hands in her lap, petals bare centimetres from the dirty tram floor. When I got off a few stops later, she was still the same. Maybe she missed her stop, maybe she was not at all conscious of where she was and where she was going. She was somewhere else, reliving moments as projections on that imaginary wall of memory she built a metre and a half in front of her to the bottom left, to keep the world at bay.


I will be gone the next few days, a day-night-day in Luxembourg to meet Ellie and Meredith, then a social experiment involving large amounts of Absinth in Hannover :) . But for now I can't wait to be on a train again and to travel and observe. This earth is so much nicer when people hide less. Not because they give you anything or you take anything from them, but because we all empathise and are reminded - and because I relived memories of feeling just like that girl this evening.

Current Music: Nouvelle Vague - Don't Go