I've Got Knives In My Eyes, I'm Going Home Sick

Oh hey, want to read a completely made up story? Then you might want to read "Girl At Train Station." I love casually flirting with girls on trains. It's based on a dream. Maybe. Or an experience that would be pretty cool. Something like that.

"Do you mind if I sit here?" I asked. Smiling, cautiously, but politely as I looked down where the girl sat.

She gazed up at me, as if she was only half paying attention to my question. She gazed at my face a little longer.

"Sure." She spoke softly. She was reading.

Not enough pretty girls read. She was pretty.

I looked at the book she was reading, there was something about her that made me want to speak. A universal interest in literature and the art of words would probably rouse me to talk. The book was old, its spine badly bent and creased, the front cover worn down. Despite this the author of the collection of ragged paper was still visible. The authors name was Franz Kafka. I smiled out loud. This outburst of...something, knowing perhaps, or maybe satisfaction, I don't know...but it drew her attention away from the page. She looked at me shyly. There was so many ways to phrase the question I was inevitably going to ask, "Oh, I see you like Kafka?" or "Good choice, I like Kafka too. What's your favourite?" All of these endless options sounded stupid. I must have thought through a hundred, a million, different combinations of words to try and think of the right way to say the question. Words were gradually being pushed forwards by my tongue, towards my lips, that were, as I struggled to think, failing to hold the half finished thoughts back.

I can't remember what I said.

I probably erased it from my memory out of embarrassment.

Whatever I did say it seemed to have the desired effect, for we were soon in an in depth conversation about the context of "In The Penal Colony," which, in case you didn't know, my dearest reader, is a strangely beautiful story about capital punishment.

"A Dream" is her favourite. It's my favourite too. We talk.

We talk.

We talk.

Her eyes pierce me as the sun shines through them. The bench on which we sit beside each other is uncomfortable, but the conversation is not awkward. I can be a very awkward person. Art is my thing. When art is your thing it's very hard to have a human conversation. It means you are unwittingly pretentious. You write words in a completely different way to how you would usually talk. My vocabulary grows immensely when I sit down with pen and paper. Sarcasm and irony are all tricks I use to avoid being liked or being tricked into engaging in normal speech. Her eyes pierce me.

"I bet you're a real heart breaker," I tell her.

She smiles. She bites her bottom lip. This is her acknowledgment of my statement. Her eyes flick down for a moment. Not even that. I don't know how long a moment is. It might be just an unspecified amount of time that feels much longer than it actually is; in which case "a moment" would not be the right term to use here, because her eyes only flicked down for a very, very short period of time, less than a second at a guess.

"I bet you like heart breakers," she replies as her eyes glance back up and pierce me again. I go through the same motions as her automatically. Smile, bite my bottom lip and flick my eyes down for not quite a moment.

"I guess I do."

Her train pulled into the station and she got up from where she sat beside me. Her summer dress fluttered lightly in the breeze that swept across the platform as the incoming locomotive distorted the gentle air.

"I'll see you around," she said, closing her book, having carefully and elegantly placed her book-mark into the tattered collection of rough pages.

"Yeah," I said back, as I watched her long red hair come to a standstill from beneath her summer's hat, as the train finally came to a halt. I observed her as she climbed on board, minding the gap like the human-less voice from the public address system instructed her to do. As the train pulled away she looked out towards me. She smiled and waved. Her eyes pierce me.