The Light Between the Stations
His face was illuminated in diverse colors as the train rattled past different sources of light –– the neon glow of a restaurant’s sign, the yellow headlights of a car waiting to cross the tracks, the occasional train racing in the opposite direction. He was the canvas of a light show.
May’s eyes rested dreamily on the stranger, but she was ready to change the direction of her glance at any moment, lest he see her staring. He was sitting on the opposite side of the four-seater booth across the aisle, and she masked her quiet stalking by pretending to look out the window on his side. He had combed the sides of his hair back, but seemed to have forgotten to do anything with the top, leaving a few strands of hair falling over his thick eyebrows. A disastrous combination of colors striped his flannel shirt, which was tucked into his jeans, and May found it endearing how he’d sloppily rolled up his sleeves to just under his elbows, as if he’d given up midway through. Not that he seemed like a lazy person, though. He was hunched over, studying a book whose cover May couldn’t decipher. And since she’d first seen him get on at Hiroshima station, he’d not once used his phone. No one is texting him, May thought. She decided that he must be single –– a girlfriend would have surely texted him by now. Her heart skipped a nervous beat and she wrestled her gaze off him for the first time in fifteen minutes.
The LED screen announced the time, 02:14 a.m. May thought about Shiro. He was probably already sleeping back in his apartment, mouth agape and naked butt sticking up into the air. She had learned about his sleeping habits the first night they’d spent together. Shiro had put on Tatsuro Yamashita’s album “Cozy,” and they’d kissed on his bed. He’d been an above-average kisser, and she’d been excited for what she thought would come next, but when she’d returned from the bathroom, she’d found him passed out on his stomach. Later, she would learn that Shiro rarely stayed up after midnight. That night, May listened to “Cozy” on her own until the early morning hours. Despite this somewhat anticlimactic first evening together, May had come to call Shiro her boyfriend soon after. On days of downpour, on days when she was sad, May would think about that summer. The youthful scent of fresh cut grass. Two months of unending possibility against the backdrop of complete certainty that she’d found the one.
Yet, by month three, the way Shiro would slurp canned peaches straight from the bottle began losing its charm. By month four, the way Shiro would squint his eyes whenever he saw her stopped exciting her. Listening to Shiro’s barrage of song recommendations began feeling like a chore by month five. That didn’t mean May didn’t love him anymore, and she was truly happy –– at least that’s what she told herself. It had just been stupid of her to assume that people can be perfectly compatible, she concluded. Humans aren’t rigid puzzle pieces that do or don’t fit together.
Sitting across the stranger in the ugly flannel though, May couldn’t shake her attraction to him. She wanted to sit down next to him. She wanted to put her head on his chest and listen as he breathed in and out. She would look up at his face and he would lean down and press his lips upon hers. She wanted to walk through the city at 3:00 a.m. by his side, past the darkness of abandoned alleys and the white light emanating from 24-hour convenience stores. She would hear the story of his life. She would never tire of this person. If it was so, would it not be a shame to let him go?
The train was silently entering the inner city and the stranger looked up from his book for the first time. Light from the windows danced erratically upon his face. May could recognize the title written on the book’s cover now –– Haruki Murakami’s Hear the Wind Sing. She’d read the book shortly before meeting Shiro, and remembered not liking it as much as Murakami’s other work. But it didn’t matter. At the next stop, she would slide into the seat in front of the stranger, and he would study her curiously. She would ask him what he thought of the book. If he said that he didn’t like it, they would talk about where Murakami went wrong. If he liked the book, she would engage him in a playful argument about it. Either way, they would end up getting off at a random station. They would walk through the city until dawn and kiss each other under the gleam of a lone streetlight.
May forced the real world back into focus. She realized that if she acted upon her imagination, she would not be able to hide whatever happened with the stranger from Shiro, both because of the guilt and because she was terrible at lying. The thought of hurting Shiro, the most tenderhearted person she’d ever met, stung her. She remembered the day she’d been fired from her internship at the architecture firm, she’d lashed out at him with a level of spite that surprised even herself. Without saying a word, he’d simply taken her in his arms and hugged her until she’d settled down. Approaching the stranger would change her relationship with Shiro completely. But May couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe their relationship had already changed too much. Maybe this was an expression of her dissatisfaction, a sign to move on.
A voice on the intercom announced the train’s arrival into Osaka station, and after slowing down carefully, it came to a smooth halt. May got up from her seat and so did the stranger. For a second, she entertained the idea that he’d also been thinking about talking to her. Perhaps he’d noticed her stare. She took a step towards him and opened her mouth to say something, but he was already gone, making his way down the aisle towards the exit doors. Puzzled, May froze in her spot but her eyes followed him out the train, onto the platform, until he disappeared from her view. She heard the doors close with a loud hiss, and the train began its march forward again.
It was dawn when May got off at Tokyo station, but the hub was already teeming with activity as salarymen rushed to work and kids clad in their uniforms navigated to school. The skyscrapers, silhouetted against the rising sun, stretched long shadows across the waking city as May waited for the bus to take her to Shiro’s apartment.
