Wrote this late last year, just typed it up. Feel free to be critical; it's not very long, and there are a few things I'm not happy with but don't know how to fix.
Extract from a train journey
B. Eastaugh, 25.10.04 / 25.01.05
The station is grimy and cold, echoing impersonality under a concrete sky. Discarded cigarette butts and fossilised chewing gum litters the floor. I sip bitter coffee and try to shut out the hubbub, diesel fumes and cigarette smoke filling the air like nerve gas.
I want to escape, to don a feathered cloak and transform into a hawk, soaring through the chill air, the wind rustling my feathers as I dive, for diving is falling and falling is dying and dying is living, while sitting here on the platform is nothing at all.
I run through a mental list of the belongings in my rucksack: t-shirts, trousers, books. No feathered cloak. Nothing to transform me from flatlining grey inexistence to some sort of life.
Later, on the train, a mother tells a recalcitrant child to take off her coat – tells her over and over, repeating the mantra like a broken record. She sounds as though she doesn’t even know what the words mean anymore. I understand the child’s reluctance. The air conditioning is chilly. My coat stays on.
When they leave the train, I look across the aisle at the seats they have vacated, and wonder if I should take the window seat. I decide against it; it is contaminated, somehow. A vacant-looking student sits there instead, oblivious.
