The last train to Montauk
Never is an awfully long time.
I spent a little over a year living out of a suitcase. I say suitcase because it sounds more romantic that way. In reality it was the same backpack and tote. Back and forth.
Leaning against the tiled wall, I slid down, down, down. My body stopped at the concrete, but everything else kept going. Cool tears sliding down burning cheeks. I stood my backpack upright so it would sit still enough to make a little table, then hunched over it. My arms wrapped around the backpack, hugging it like it was a dog. Even with my face buried into blue canvas, I could still see legs and shoes passing by in my peripheral, keeping a keen awareness of anyone who might get too close.
My intuitive awareness of people around me developed in the crowded hallways of high school. That’s when some of the real growth spurts happened. Or stopped. I had been elbowed in the face enough times that ducking and weaving between crowds had become a survival skill. I stopped growing at the age of twelve when I developed an eating disorder. My mom being as short as she was made it seem no surprise when I ended up the same. Except I weighed less than 100 pounds until my mid-twenties. Travel light, travel far.
My eyes burned.
Everything felt hot, except my fingers, as though the moment the word entered my ears all of the blood in my body rushed to my head to support the moanful weeping and pleading that reflexively spewed forth like a volcanic flow of need. I need you. I need you to not say never. Sitting, clinging, waiting, I periodically lifted my chin just enough to check the departure board. How can they not know what goddamn platform the rain is arriving in until it’s already there? I don’t want to feel like cattle rushing toward feed. I want to disappear. But I’m here. But I have to go to work. I could have said something else. What the magic words?
Please.
I tried that one. Please, don’t leave me. Please, don’t send me away. Please, love me. Please, tell me why you don’t.
If I had just been more, would have seen me differently. I don’t know, I don’t know. Seven years have passed and I can now say no, he wouldn’t have. I didn’t need to be more.
Something about taking a deep breath in helps shove some of the emotional surge back down my throat and into my stomach just long enough for me to rise from the floor, sling my bags over my shoulders, and run to the entrance, down the stairs, onto the platform, and shove my bags into a seat beside me so no one else will sit there. I don’t even care if someone thinks I’m being a dick for taking up two spots. Getting felt up by strangers on public transit twice is enough for me to claim some extra space. Fuckers.
The ride from Penn Station to Newark is a blur. Reflecting on my year of suitcase suitcase, that’s mostly what I remember. The rhythmic vibrations of the trains, the change of pressure in planes lifting off, the coarse knots of industrial carpet. Years of my memory are transitions between waiting rooms. “So what’s it like in the Hamptons? Did you meet anyone famous?” I don’t know. I don’t remember. I can tell you where the best place is to take a shit without having to buy something and without feeling like complete scum. I remember the face of the woman I sat next to on the plane, “Rough day?” Yeah. Rough day.
I’d slept in airports and train stations and every form of transportation. “She needs me.” No, actually, she doesn’t because she’s a cunt who’s going to stab you in the back and I will love you for ever. She did. I do. I found that my favorite time to sleep is in that moment after takeoff on airplanes or that last stretch of the LIRR to Montauk after all the non-East Enders got off and the conductor announces Westhampton.
East Hampton, East Hampton. My heart raced at the sound. Before leaving the platform for his car, I was going to tell him, “Please, love me. I promise I’ll love you. With every breath in my body I’ll love you until it ceases. Until that last breath it’s yours. Just please, don’t leave me.” But what if he’s not there? What if he doesn’t come for me? What if I walk to his front door and it’s locked? What if he immediately sends me away and I have to sleep in the train station, again? What if she’s there? What if
But he was there to receive me. I could see him getting out of the black Jeep as the train was pulling to a stop. I grabbed my bags and stepped out. He walked toward me and I dropped my bags to quicken my pace toward him. I kneeled.
“Please, I love you. I promise I will love you for the rest of my life.” little concrete pebbles dug into my shins.
“We can never be together. She needs me.”
No. No she doesn’t. Isn’t she the one who cheated on you? Didn’t she stab you in the back? Repeatedly? I know you’re masochistic daddy, but there’s going to be nothing left of you if you keep letting her wield that blade.
He grabbed my backpack and my hand, lifting both, and we walked away from the platform.