the wait

you seep into my eyelids
-like another sleepless night


The train came to a halt in the middle of nowhere, somewhere between King's Cross and Cambridge. The system had broken down, they said. I pulled out Pico Iyer's "Abandon", trying to kill those endless hours of being held-up among strangers, in a strange place. The train was mostly quiet, aside from muffled telephone conversations- people informing their loved ones, bosses, and associates, about the delay.

Across the aisle, someone had started talking to his fellow-passenger. He spoke with a sharp English accent. Hers was coarse German. I heard the word Munich. He said he'd traveled some parts of Germany. She was a student of English Literature at Cambridge.

"Abandon" had started to become little else, besides Rumi's poetry. I went back to the poems repeatedly, instead of following the progess of the plot. That, I interrupted several times, with pulling my sleeve back to look at my wrist watch or just fishing out my mobile phone from my pocket to read and write back text messages asking me which station.

Tri continued texting me. I pictured him standing in the cold of the Cambridge station, waiting for the train to pull in. I froze with guilt. I didn't deserve to have him waiting like that. The prodigal son must have been like me. I was returning home after almost a week of London, which I'd lived with fervent abandon, all the while, almost forgetting all about Tri.

Tri, like a tree. Always around, kind, cool, reliable- almost like a father. And what did I have for him? A roving mind, questions, more questions and so much need- he could never fathom.

When I thought of him that night, I had thought I would run into his arms the moment I jumped off onto the platform and would ask his forgiveness for who I was. Tell him he lived somewhere so deep, even for the shallow that was me. I hoped he'd perhaps understand that during the walk near our favourite tree, the look I had placed on his slightly upturned nose and the longing with which I took in his generous eyes and his dimples, had been more than just a casual pause. Maybe he would understand that I had looked at him right then like that, just so that I could forever remember him that way, standing there with serenity on his face, telling me how much he loved that particular tree. He had said it was like his diety.

The system was back on track. The train started moving again. The German girl and the Englishman kept talking, laughing. When the train arrived in Cambridge, the girl decided to join the man. They exchanged a long kiss before she slid her right arm into his left, and walked on.

Tri was standing at the platform, looking like a schoolboy- smallish, agile. He smiled like something major had just happened and I smiled back and apologized for the delay.
"No worries. It happens sometimes. Not your fault."

When he drove me home my mind filled with the monuments in the Bristish History Museum and the BOUM sound installation at Tate modern, by an artist, whose name I could no longer remember. I had stood in the vast, vast expanse of the hall, letting the echo swallow me completely. The BOUM almost sucked me in. I felt its vibration-like waves against a big bell, even as I sat in Tri's car.

He played something for me to listen to. "My generation stuff", he said.

I heard someone familiar sing a lyric with words like eyes, love, forever, heart and life. And I kept thinking how I could never, never bring myself to explain to Tri how much it meant to always have him at the station to take me home, no matter how far and long I'd been.