Kindergarten Train

I’ll be on the train. It’ll be an underground train, like the subway, but at an airport. One door is both the exit and the entrance, with a few people trickling in and out. The train’s name will be Bart and my father will have warned me about him. The train will have pastel colours of gum, crafted into graffiti and messages in another language.

I’ll know that if I was in another world, I’d call it art and take a photo to show my kids.

I’ll be standing. Sucking on a mint and moulding it into the shape of my tongue. Dust will fall from the ceiling and settle on the cloth seats. Somebody else would have warned me about the cloth seats, too. Something about sitting on them causes years of sweat and an old man's cologne to waft up into your face, like a pop-up card.

In the next second, she’ll stand beside me. It won’t be anything like a big lie. Just her, entering the train and walking over to grasp the overhead handles. No physical contact or glances or words exchanged.

She’ll be pretty. Short, white hair and earbuds hang limply from her ears and tangle in her sweater. Two red studs, like the eyes of a monkey. My kids will grow up in four different states and they’ll know that she is what Aphrodite would look like.

I’ll wonder why I feel this way. It’s not love. Or at least not the type you can find in half-dead roses at the florist beside the highway. And definitely not the kind next to a coffee machine in an office that leads to a wedding in a hotel and three ungrateful children.

It’s odd, this feeling. Giddy. I’ll think about how I used to smile at people riding on the train. I’ll want to smile then. It was a basic skill in kindergarten, learning how to smile. I'll remember the classroom with the round glasses and aloe vera plants named after characters from the old cartoons from the 70's. But it was so simple, just turning the corners of your mouth into a crescent shape, like the moon in early December. I’ll have stopped smiling by then, when I’m on the train. And it won’t be taught to my kids anymore. That’s what I’ll know while standing there.

What I also know is that the year is ending. Time is skidding to a stop, only to be picked up again at midnight. Midnight is so close, I can almost touch it. Three cracked hands on the clock, almost vertical. It would be pretty ironic, really. I’ll be on the Bart train, heading for Terminal D, in the last seconds of the year. And I won’t be thinking about who I left behind.

‘I met a girl on the train,’ I’ll tell my kids on the phone.

‘Why did you leave?’ they’ll ask me.

‘She looked sad.’

‘Everyone is sad at some point,’ they’ll respond, and hang up soon after.

The girl will be running her hands down the pole on her left. Her fingers will be small. She’ll only have four fingers on one hand. I’ll love it. I would want to cradle the stump in my palm and ask about the tractor accident. Will it be because of her eyes that can only see straight forward? Or because she wasn’t paying attention and looked at the weeds with their yellow, withered faces?

She’ll be holding one pole. Five other poles will be placed haphazardly around the train. All with dirt in the cracks and scratches. All cold and metal. All of them look like maps of past events. A map of fights and colliding suitcases and underground trains controlled by robots.

The girl will close her eyes and I’ll see how her eyelashes curl and twist like spider webs on her cheeks. They’ll be fake, obviously, but I will want to touch them. I'd want to play the childish role of knitting my fingers behind my back and asking if she wanted to be friends.

But she’ll be a stranger on the Bart and soon I’ll be late for my flight.

She’ll tap her shoe in a diagonal rhythm. The cord will wiggle and bounce against her chest like a white snake. Six knots will be pretzeled into it, and as a father hooked on a fishing line, I'll want to take it and untangle it.

Jazz will drift from her earbuds. It’ll be the type of music that’s whitewashed by lyrics. The type where the male singer moves his voice up and down the spectrum and sings of rainbows in the shower. I’ll hate it, for sure. But I’ll also love it. And the way the girl’s hips will sway while her boarding pass flaps in between her fingers.

In another world, I would know that she’d offer me an earbud and we’d listen together. But that would take minutes, and I'd only be watching from afar as time faded away like an escalator. A stairway to heaven.

There will be exactly seven ads on the train. One for Suncorp Loans, with smiling actors and a new house. The second for a dating app, like hell anyone will try that. Third, is Harvey Norman, a place with fridges and happy employees. The fifth is McDonald’s with bright colours to catch your eye, and the sixth is for men’s coats. The seventh is for a makeup company with the slogan ‘Look how you feel.’

Does that mean I should look grey and lost and tied to the tracks? Or free with a face-paint of butterfly wings like the stuff we used to get at kindergarten birthday parties?

Suddenly, the girl will grab my wrist. Not too hard. Eight of her nails would dig into my skin. The last one will be ripped off in one way or another.

It’ll only last a moment. Our breath will mix like chicken soup. She’ll lock her hand behind my back and press her lips against my cheek. I’ll almost swallow the mint I’ll have in my mouth. Alarm bells will go off in my head. I’ll be able to remember the clocks and their ticking, vaguely, like the chug of an old train. It’ll be the new year. And I won’t feel different at all.

This will be a problem. I’ll have snuck away from my loving wife in bed and our three red-nosed children, just to stand on a train and get kissed by a stranger and feel the same. I’ll look at the girl and she’ll avoid my gaze. She’ll be Aphrodite and I’ll be Melbourne, miles away and very cold.

There will be nine ways to continue, but only a few will float by at the time. The first one being to go and disappear. The second one being to return to my family. And the third one being—nothing.

Fairytales were something I read in kindergarten. I’ll feel like I’m living it, having the male character choose to be free and wild or return home to his children, who don’t love him, in a house that smells of garbage.

It will be a dreadful metaphor. A common one. I’ll be caught in it, though. The train being life, speeding up and me either grasping for a ride or stumbling into the past. I won’t want to be controlled by it, yet I will be. Everyone is.

Even the girl who avoids my gaze and listens to jazz as if the world is falling apart in her fingers. So, I crack the mint in my mouth into ten tiny pieces. I’ll gulp nine into the stone-shaped lump in my throat and spit one out into my palm.

It’ll get forced into a piece of gum and barely stand out. But I’ve already made my mark. The gum won’t be sticky anymore and I won’t be afraid of its messages with bite marks. Or beautiful, foreign graffiti that will envelop Bart in a sense of belonging.

Before the doors close, I’ll sprint out, dragging my suitcase behind me, and hop onto another train that looks exactly the same.

Aphrodite will be watching, one earbud dripping onto her shoulder, wondering how someone so tortured could escape something we learned as early as kindergarten.