Sea of Tears

The door slid open with a pneumatic pssshhh and the stench (for that could be the only word to give the air the proper weight) of people, packed and crammed, the faint aromatic of piss and the sweetening yet sickening smell of sweat mingled into a perfume of delightful humanity. I didn’t have a reservation for the train and most all the seats car, cutting through the acrid air. I slung my hitchhiker bag into the baggage rack and found an open seat. Put down my other bag with all the gadgets and whistles that modern necessity required of me, stripped off the two coats and scarf that had been suffocating my body the whole walk to the train station.

I threw myself down into the seat and quickly became acclimated to that all too familiar but unusually concentrated smell. I stared out the fogged window at a frosty reflection of my own face and I felt the train begin to pull me from behind. The station slowly started moving away from me and I watched it disappear into the night. That’s when it all began to come into me, or rather out of me, out from inside of that ethereal little string that binds me together; it seeped through the cracks, a glowing red of fully oxygenated love.

I was back in her apartment, the first time in her apartment, the only time in this apartment. She was living and studying in Strasbourg at the time. She was there next to me, distant but there…at least she was there, that had been a change; or rather I was there; sitting next to her in her bed from IKEA, starring at the bouncing , morphing screen saver on her lap top.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I don’t know, I feel like I can’t express what I want to express, there’s a wall. You somehow built a wall in between you and me.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“I feel like I don’t know you, like I recognize you but I don’t know you, or at least you don’t recognize me.” Her eyes looked at me solidly slowly, intently listening to my words but with an air of detachment that was driving me insane. “It’s like the person I know in here,” I pushed my fore-finger into my forehead and tapped with all my force, “isn’t here in front of me, like I’ve fallen into a gap between two realities…” With that word, all was lost and I sank into the deep dark crevice of suffocating passion. My eyes snapped shut, pushing out gallon upon gallon of water until the abyss began to fill with my tears. The water grew higher and higher and as it came up to my knees, my waist, and finally my shoulders, I noticed that my feet were no longer touching bottom. I began to float upon my tears.

I can still smell the dried salt cling to my face or maybe it’s that smell horrible smell of people, salty, sweet, oppressive, ugly; but without those tears upon which I float, I would have sunk, long ago, to the bottom of that bottomless abyss.