The pause before the jump (part 3)

I was waiting for her in front of the station. As always, she was late. she’d told me once that punctuality was the shameful confession of a profound lack of imagination. Those were her exact words, I swear. She just loved making things sound more important then they were. For her, everything she did was a matter of principle. It was all pretty ridiculous, in a beautiful kind of way. Still, for some reason, I’d sort of hoped it would be different this time. To be honest though, I didn’t mind waiting too much. It was late in the afternoon, and the sun was shining bright and crashing down against the polished pavestones, and the street was crammed with tourists, running around all other the place like overgrown children, laughing and shouting and going in circles. That’s the kind of thing I really get a kick out of. When you’re waiting for someone, or something to happen, and the world is right there, right in your face, and you look around and you feel like you could do anything, anything you wanted, if you just tried hard enough. It got me really excited for some reason. So I just sat down on the pavement, and lit a cigarette, and I tried to take as much of it in as possible, while it was still there.

“Doesn’t it scare you to think that all these people exist even when you’re not around, that they all have lives that you’ll never be a part of?”

She’d sat down next to me without me noticing it. She was wearing this white summer dress, which tightened softly at her waist, and her eyes were hidden behind a pair of small round sunglasses.

“What do you want to do?” I asked her.

“The weather’s beautiful, let’s go for a walk.”

So we got up and started walking, and she kind of linked her arm around mine. She didn’t make a big deal out of it or anything, she just did it like it was the most natural thing in the world. She was walking pretty fast, hardly paying any attention to the world around her, and she talked the whole time, barely stopping to catch a breath every now and then. Words left her mouth at a break neck speed, chasing after each other, crashing into everything around her. I didn’t say anything, I just watched her, hardly able to believe she was real.

“The problem ,” she was saying “ is that people always think they have to be going somewhere. That’s why they end up miserable. I mean they head out with all these dreams you know, all these convictions about who they’re going to be, what they’re going to do; but without really noticing it they get sucked up into the world, and they slowly lose sight of what it is they’d set out for in the first place. And one day they wake up and they’re forty, working a job which is draining the life out of them, married to someone they don’t even love anymore, without any dreams or hopes or anything left. And all they can do is just endure it you know, endure it without complaining, because it’s not like anybody forced them into anything, there’s nobody to blame. So they just shut up and suffer in silence, and they call it being mature just so they can feel better about the whole thing. Now, I don’t want that, I really don’t, so I’ve come up with this real simple life philosophy..”

She stopped short then, let go of my arm, and ran up to the window of this old shop a little ways down the road. She leaned in and cupped her hands against the glass to get a better look at what had caught her eye. The shop was closed.

“Look!" she cried, waving at me to come over, "I used to have the exact same train set when I was little! It was a beautiful train set, I have to ask my mum what happened to it. Oh, I really hope she didn’t throw it out! That’s exactly the kind of thing she’d do, she’s always throwing things out. It’s unbelievable, it’s the exact same train set! I remember I used to make the train go round and round so fast, and it would always end up just shooting right off the tracks.” and she laughed, like it was the most wonderful thing in the world, and turned back towards me. I lowered my eyes a little too late, and her laughter died away. We kind of walked in silence after that, and at some point she decided we should turn left, and somehow we ended up in front of the station again.