Where the line ends

The park by the Mall is an easy place to be by yourself. I have a book and music is playing from inside my bag and it’s a soundtrack as I walk further from the roads. Music played that way can sometimes be a barrier when you’re walking. It is sometimes a closed door. But today it is a window. The squirrels in the park by the Mall scurry up to the people. Man and beast reach out with their hands and exchange nuts like coloured jewels. The squirrels’ feet are clasped around the railings and they push the nuts into their mouths and leap towards the pond with the firework fountain in its middle. The people are amused then and some of them point as the squirrels disappear behind green leaves, and some laugh and others put their hands into their pockets or into another hand. In time they all walk away, back to wherever it was they were going before. Some of them take photographs with their phones or with their cameras. One couple asks a passing man in a mackintosh to take a photograph of them both, the city behind an open fan. Their faces are the same, their features bobbing on the surface like a boat.  
If I had a coffee in my hand then I would know what to do with my hand, the one that isn’t holding my book. As it is, it languishes in my lap, turns pages when necessary, scratches at my face, pushes up my glasses. The palm settles facing upwards and then twists beneath my coat. It is restless and I think maybe that I am too.

Last night a boy in a club danced cartwheels with his arms and we drank beer and got pushed against one another in the crowd. The boy is different to me. He is easy and I am a difficult confusion of knots. He wasn’t wearing a hat but when I think about last night he is wearing a hat and it gets knocked to the floor by the people dancing. When I think about last night his eyes are closed and his mouth is turned upwards at the sides and we are two different people than we are but we are still two boys, in a crowd of dancing people with paint on their faces.  

I remember another boy then, one from my past who seemed easy but wasn’t. I think about a summer that in the wake of summers since has grown cold and ordinary. I think about my hand in his hair and it prickles now. It didn’t before but it prickles now. And another before him, as wet as paste in my memory. Time can often be cruel I suppose. It often dulls the shine of things that were once new.

I’ve become adept at projecting a personality onto a person I do not yet know. It is a way of saving time predominately. I can write the story of our life together through to its finishing point, and before we have said hello I am already leaving through the front door of the house we once shared, a final box of belongings in my arms (your blue tie, your grey t-shirt, that drawing of two coyotes or foxes or dogs you made on the plane; those things, that once stacked up upon one another build a life). It is childish to partake in such frivolity but I am a nervous adult who often needs the comfort of child’s play.   

I’m having a hard time not being in love then; or a harder time perhaps believing that it is a venture worth while. ‘Everything ends’ reads a note I found this morning in my phone as I skipped between my car and an appointment in a different town. I wonder what prompted such grandiose finality and the words become a tornado swirl of jumbled letters on the inside of my head. Everything is always ending I am realising now, but that in turn allows new things to begin. We each are forever starting over.     

I am on a train and it is dark and the train is empty except for me and the conductor. The conductor walks up and then down the aisle; his job to leave and then come back again, to constantly be between two places. In a different reality I would strike up a conversation with this man, who looks weary and ready to call it a night. In a different reality I would say to him that we were the same, him and I; both between places, both going and coming back again. If this had been a different train, and I had perhaps been a little less concerned of becoming the late night travelling cliché I have often been told that I am, I would have said something that would maybe have brought us both a little comfort on a cold Sunday in January.

The train pulls into the station and I get off. I am at home, where the line ends.