On the L Train

It’s just like the stories said it would be. The reliable weight of the wheels, furling and unfurling the sound of Chicago’s heart-beat beneath the clunk of metal. Tasting it and spitting it back out again.

And again.

And again.

My back rests against the crushed velvet–a shade of Pepsi can blue, at once gaudy and comforting. Like grandma’s house. There is none but me on this Wednesday morning train, the only other passenger a silence that stretches its arms and expands to fill the space the way my uncle does after Thanksgiving.

Outside the window, apartment complexes of red clay brick, edges crisp and blackened by time and negligence, flit by in an assembly line of stories and lives I will never come to know. It’s a nostalgia for something I never had.

Slanted sunlight paints my forehead, nose and chin in the warm caramel of mid-morning light changing into its noon-time clothes. The recycled voice from the speaker in the corner announces our arrival in Dempster.

Two more stops.

I don’t want to get off.