Departure

"Everybody is young forever. There's so much to tell you, so little time."

Goodbye should never leave such a sweet, clean taste in the mouth. All those movie kisses seem bitter and resentful by contrast, and that sunset doomed lovers walk into blood-red as the light washing up against frail, tender skin, trying to pry loose lashes locked like clutching fingers. Nothing so doomed here, nothing so desperate. He opens his eyes to see present and future, imagines these realities rippling the thin film stretched from upper to lower lid, piercing like a needle, injecting reality into the black centres of each glistening grey-blue pool. Colour swells and darkness recedes.

Nothing is so transient as a metropolitan airport. A disembodied voice, female in gender but empty of inflection, plays monotone solo over the humming, clattering nonsense of a rhythm section that changes by the minute. A man is agitated, a girl is laughing, a baby is screaming. A suitcase falls from a trolley as an electric cart whines by. Blink and the faces change. Where there is continuity, there is anonymity; uniforms and smooth, clear skin; taut, tied hair and blank smiles; that peculiar language where every sentence carries the can-I-help-you rhythm and timbre.

He feels stupid because he looked back and waved. She was elsewhere, thinking thoughts he no longer shared. The gesture passed her by, passed everyone by, lost all meaning. He'd pivoted a little, still moving away. He'd found her face in the crowd. He'd raised his arm, hand open, palm pushed outward. One, two, three seconds. It felt mechanical, forced, stupid. He was in a bad movie, being played by some washed-up child star.

Still the leading man, though. The fist in his gut is white-knuckled, squeezing out sighs and salt water. He moves against a tide of dead-eyed passengers, overtaking those standing motionless on walkways and escalators, treading carefully on tastefully marbled floors scuffed with age and liver-spotted with gum. He sees the adverts on the walls in his peripheral vision and his TV-conditioned memory fills in the blanks. Monotony in glorious widescreen.

So tired. So used to being asleep at this time of the day. Yesterday he'd turned over at almost exactly this moment, thrown an arm over her hip and felt her fingers slip between his like a reflex action, as though even in sleep she'd expected him. In her company, he craves intimacy.

He queues and buys a ticket, takes another escalator to another drab level of concrete and steel. These lights suck the life out of everything, dull these bright fashion colours and give a ghostly pallor to all but the most powdered of faces. Everybody looks for the emptiest carriage, the space they can have to themselves. Nobody smiles except when things go wrong, when they can turn to their neighbour and wordlessly wonder what the world is coming to. Eyes roll and thoughts come in the language of tabloid editorials. Yawns Mexican wave up and down the carriage, are carried out onto the platforms and stairs of each new station, to the street and city beyond, to the country and maybe the world.

It hurts to miss her, but he's glad of it. Too many times he has walked away and felt nothing but relief, anticipating the warmth and comfort of boredom as an old and trusted friend to be embraced and held until aches die and unseen bruises fade. He likes that not having her is an open wound. He likes to touch it to check the blood is still fresh.

He bites his nails and watches the scenery go by. He reads the graffiti and looks for familiar tags. He counts the minutes since and the minutes until.