It was pouring by the time he had arrived at the doors of the city station. Greeted by automatic doors and cold steel and escalators and glass ceilings and harsh halogen lights and silence at 2 in the morning, tired. It was a dream.
But still he dragged his soaked luggage and a wet Rolling Stone through this empty expanse, past nobody else at all.
The train had already come earlier this evening, but he thought maybe he could wait out the rain a bit and board tonight. He regretted it more than anything now.
Down the escalators,
Onto the linoleum of the platform,
Waited on a cold metal bench,
Tuned out the harsh edges of reality with loud music. Nirvana. Freedom from the vicious cycle.
But then the train arrived, glided to a stop,
And it was still raining outside the station, right now, probably. The boy yawned,
And he stepped into an empty cabin. No, there was a girl in the very front right seat.
Don’t mind her. Ignore her. It might be a bit lonely, but save yourself the embarrassment and sit alone. And he was about to sit down in the very first seat to the right.
But she spoke.
“Can you sit over here?”
.
“Uh… alright.” he said, but he was more than happy.
The PA announced the closing of the train’s doors monotonously.
“It’s a bit lonely at 2 in the morning is all. Someone to talk to would be nice.” She looked up at him.
Short, short hair, short shorts, a cami, and a hoodie. He eyed the cup noodles on her fold-out table.
“They have ramen in the vending machines over there. Here, if I had a cup, I’d pour some out for you"
“Not hungry…” Lies. He sat down across from her, in a window seat, and pulled his earphones out.
Silence now.
“So where are you headed?”
“Kaohsiung,” he replied.
(“Oh, I love the bookstore there!” she cried)
“I went to an English school two, three years back.”
“It’s nice to do that, I think.” She said this as she glanced out the window. The rain came harder than ever now, he thought, but it was silenced by the sigh of the AC.
“Reliving old memories, I mean. There’s a bookstore there, you know? It’s on the very top level of that mall… What’s it called?”
“Sogo? The fashion mall, right?”
It did have one on the top floor, right? Or was it a theatre?
“The Bookstore on Top of the World.”
“Is that what it’s called?”
“No, just in my mind.” She smiled. “But it is amazing. I used to think that when I got to college, maybe I could visit every day. Reality fades away when you’re reading.”
She paused.
“I think life is really stressful and overly complicated. You have to give them all a good performance, but it’s not what you really think. And maybe you could tell them how you really feel, but they think you’re just acting. And either way, you feel so guilty in the end because you can’t do anything… like… have you seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s?”
“I don’t think so. Was that the Hepburn one?”
He looked out the window. Black. They were out of the city now, he thought, or maybe underground.
“You should see it. Audrey’s amazing.” She yawned.
“Are you tired?”
“Not really. You can sleep now if you want.”
She took off her jacket and bunched it into a ball. Makeshift pillow.
“Um, hey… did I get your name?” She closed her eyes.
“Trent.”
“Are you single, Trent?”
“I had a girlfriend in Kaohsiung. Alice."
“What was she like?”
“She was really nice. We went to the carousel together the day just before I left. It was raining, but she wanted to go to the carousel because it would be just like in Catcher, and she looked so nice with the rain running down her face…”
But he caught himself.
“That could have been a line from a bad Korean soap opera...”
She laughed. “Keep going.”
So he told her about how he first met her when he arrived at the boarding school.
He talked about shaved ice in the summer and the comic market in the winter.
He talked about visiting her dorm before the typhoons and watching anime under the colorless and rain-drenched skies, about lonely work at a 7-Eleven’s through the summer nights, about riding mopeds through the neon jungle, about adult video games, 24-hour cafés, stray cats, cheap noodles, the carousel, the carousel, and he kept mentioning the carousel because she loved the carousel a lot.
I shouldn’t be here, she would say, or I don’t belong here, or I want to disappear, and he would take her out for ice cream, or coffee, or maybe just shower her in compliments if he was short on cash.
And often times, he thought, I wonder if life would get better, because it’s so frustratingly empty right now, and he would drown himself out in music, and he would never tell her. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure if he liked her so much, but he wished he did.
And so he promised her that one day, when he was done with his studies, he could return all tired and sweaty, and luggage behind him, and his breath in the air, and cranky taxi drivers in taxis, and they could rent an apartment, and they could live together, and all his friends would be next door, and his sister could visit in the summer, maybe, and…
The girl was asleep.
Somewhere between 3 and 4, he got up and bought some grapefruit juice from the vending machine. Amidst the typhoon, the neon signs of the city danced back and forth like ghosts.
