A life resigned: Love/Loss/Intimacy

She was a an overeater at the best of times, but when she was alone, it was ever the worse.

She only bought and ate carrots, so that when she binged, she wouldn't gain weight. The excess carotene in her body rendered her skin with a golden glow that attracted him in first place, as she stood out from the crowd that ebbed and follow around the train station.

He was cripplingly shy, and had been since childhood. The only way he found he could express all this repressed life was to draw alone after midnight, all over the walls. Consequently he was constantly being evicted from the one bedroom apartments he occupied. No one ever saw this work, accept the disgruntled real estate agents that gestured to him only with at eviction notices and frowns.

When he saw her passing through the crowd one Wednesday, he had a moment where the background receded slightly, as his pupils dilated with pleasure. This head swam with the additional sunlight that pulse through his suddenly augmented ocular situation. Having never experienced such a feeling, he wondered if it was just down to having not eaten lunch.

Not knowing at all how to speak a word to her, he then meekly returned every day to the same station in the hope that she would be there again, and he might see her, maybe even brush past her, might smell her scent, might be able to see the colour of her eyes, if he positioned himself correctly. To his luck, she was a creature of habit, catching the same train every day, so he would stand at the same safe distance and just watch her pass for what seemed weeks

Late one night, with a vermilion-shade Derwent pencil gripped tightly in his right hand, poised over the pale green wallpaper of his apartment, he realised that he could not go on this way. The next day he again went to the station, but this time he took the same train as her, and took a seat opposite. She gazed serenely out of the window as the trees and graffiti outside passed like a speeding gallery. He waited for the right moment, barely breathing, trying to control the fear that was seeping slowly into him like the nightly chill.

Finally, as the train pulled away from another platform, heading south along the thin line that was the coast of the bay, she looked away from the window view and gazed into his face. He smiled. She smiled too, and then looked back out towards the horizon. At the next station, he got off the train, resigned to a life that he would not know with her. But he took with him the smile that she had given him, and we returned to his apartment, where he sketched it upon all four walls.

Monique