Missed Connection [flash fiction]

I saw you across the platform of the subway station. You were wearing bright blue knee-length tube socks, a loose black sheath dress, and impossibly high black ankle boots, one booted foot tapping out a rhythm over the other leg. I was standing on the opposite platform, watching you, looking at your femininity obscuring the masculinity of your birth. Your eye shadow was a vibrant blue over your eyelids and trailed silver sparkles to your temples. You were stunning.

You sat on the wooden bench writing in a little notebook, oblivious to the crowd shifting around you, blissfully ignorant of the argument down the other end of the platform. I don’t know if it was the way the strange yellow station lights sought you out in the crowd or if it was because of your own special glow, but you were a radiant of light in an ugly setting. You looked like you had fallen in love that night, a smile playing around the corners of your mouth as your pen flew across the pages of the your notebook. You were enclosed in a glow of soft vulnerability and impenetrable strength that only a deep abiding love could provide.

As you set pen to paper, that slender instrument gliding gracefully across the page, I watched the beauty of your face, the almost smile tugging on the corners of your lips, your eyes glowing with growing intensity as your scribbles flew faster. Were you remembering a beautiful encounter, or were you mourning a loss? Because as I stepped onto my train, I saw a single tear fall from your eye onto the page of your notebook. I watched you resolutely close your notebook on that wet stain, inevitably smudging your writing, and hugged the notebook tightly to your bosom. You stared blankly into the tracks. I wondered what had crossed your mind in that moment, what terrible memory had been conjured up to cause the entirety of your person to snap closed in an instant.

You stood up and walked to the platform’s edge as the train was announced over the loudspeakers. You looked up and our eyes met for a split moment as my train pulled away from the station. In that instant, I saw the depths of your pain in your pools of deep hazel, and it pierced my heart to the very core, leaving me gasping for breath as my hand clutched to my chest. I lurched away from the window as I swiveled around, and my eyes searched frantically around me at the faces of the other passengers in a desperate need to confirm what I had seen. But nobody paid me any attention.

As I took a step towards the communications button that would connect me to the conductor, a deafening shriek of brakes from the station we had just left reverberated through the tunnel. Too late. I was unable to save you.

Later, I would read about the tragedy in the news and I would remember that moment of your beauty falling to pieces.

What did you lose?