The train was late. The 4:05 under 37th Street was still nowhere to be seen at 4:09, but none of the handful of us waiting on the concrete under the buzzing lights were getting antsy or glancing at watches and mumbling curses. We were too enthralled in the drama playing out before us.
A man and a woman, both looking to be in their mid-30’s, stood together on the platform, their faces close, both wet with tears. They spoke in whispers that sometimes grew to something more in the quiet of the nearly empty station. We heard snippets.
“—can’t do this anymore.”
“I know, I know—”
“ —never going to change—better this way—”
They would embrace—fiercely, like it might hurt—then pull back and whisper and cry and embrace again. Over and over. And, every now and then, one or both of them would smile. And that smile seemed most terrible of all. Because the smile would always crumple back into tears and the unremitting waves of pain that they emanated would intensify.
As they carried on, I found myself inching backwards away from them even as I strained to hear what they were saying. It was so intimate as to feel private. Like we were intruding on a personal moment not meant for our eyes. The busker several feet away from me quietly tuned his guitar though it sounded perfectly in tune. An old man in a porkpie hat let his newspaper droop. Two teenage girls’ faces reflected the light of their phone screens even as their eyes remained on the couple.
I can’t speak for the four other witnesses scattered about the platform, but I’d already conjured an elaborate backstory for this couple who seemed to personify love and pain and passion and heartache more than anyone I’d ever seen. He was married. She was ‘the other woman’. Maybe they were coworkers who’d spent too many late nights bonding over shared goals. Or an old flame rekindled on Facebook. Or a chance encounter in a bar that had blossomed into something more. But he refused to leave his wife and she refused to remain in this horrible limbo even though they loved each other with a fierceness neither could deny.
And she’d made her decision. When the train arrived, she would board and he would not, and their paths would diverge, their lives disentangle, and she would again be alone.
It had a beautiful poetry to it, and my writer’s heart bloomed with an ache to write a happy ending for these star-crossed lovers even as they set about their tear-fueled farewells.
We heard the oncoming train.
I stepped closer to the couple.
“It’s almost time,” she said.
“Are you sure? I love you. Are you sure?”
She was.
They embraced again, so tightly I could see the tips of her fingers whiten against his nondescript jacket.
The front of the train shot from the tunnel.
As one, they leapt in front of it.
The angry snap and squelch were nearly drowned out by the hiss of the train’s breaks as it slowed to take on its passengers. Whether the operator had even seen the couple, I can’t say. Me and the busker and the old man with his newspaper and the girls with their phones stepped forward and found our seats. And, moments later, we were moving again.