Bart Train Blues

Bart Train Blues

Where am I in this? Where do I fit in? I have my forehead pressed to the glass again, leaving a greasy skin mark on other peoples perfectly planned lives. Lives that are always flowing and light. I am feeling very envious and the struggles I have endured feel achy deep in my bones. My chest hurts, like my heart is struggling to keep beating because it wonders, what is the point?


I walked alone through the crowds of strangers. Past the hustlers and toothless addicts running from their own thin shadows. Past the homeless men sleeping so soundly beneath their filthy blankets. Well dressed men walk quickly beside me, and then pass me in shoes shinning so brightly, their minds miles away. And the women...the goddamned women. Cherokee cheekbones and haircuts that cost more that my entire outfit. They take long strides; they ease by with long graceful necks like gazelles. Their hair always fluid behind them.


Night was falling too fast but my heart was falling much faster. Made my way down fleets of out of order escalators. Down into the churning belly of the train station, I was one of the only ones there. A man pushed a wheeled cleaning cart past slowly, his brown gravely face, those black aching eyes trying to drink in my youth. His cart thudding over brick after brick and over filthy tiles that have felt lifetimes of shoe soles.


It has been such an overwhelming day a lot to take in. My eyes start to sting. I feel as if I could easily sob out loud but I don't. Hearing the echo of my own tiny voice drowned out only by the trains sweeping by would be too common a scene in this cities underbelly. I don't want to fit in too well down here with the forsaken. Instead I keep my eyes drifting from one graffiti littered advertisements to the next as more people shuffle in and out.


The ride home seems an eternal sentence as I sit on the threadbare upholstery that is stinking and stained. All of the faces of the people around me look a little more grim tonight, a little more hopeless than usual. These bodies on the train with me look like they have been commuting for hundreds of years. Dead eyes mouths sealed tightly. Eyes blinded to absolutely anything that happens on the train. Commuter robots programmed to switch off when they sit down on the train. There are however some people like me who are curious about everyone, we take turns eyeing each other’s faces, clothes, shoes, and reading material ... careful to not make eye contact.


At the Oakland stop one of those "real" vampires’ walks in. His long shoe polish black hair slicked back. Draped in crushed velvet robes, pointy polished dress shoes and skin powdered unnaturally white, He would like to think that he never walked through those train doors; he just appeared next to me. I'm sure he and his vampire friends drink blood and pretend they need it and then suffer through tarry black bowel movements later. Then cry because they are alive like everyone else. There is always at least one person who is strange and I enjoy watching as people edge further and further away from him. I enjoy watching people stare with disgust. People roll their eyes.