MargenThere is a station between the two cities where I live that no train considers worth stopping at. I cross it four times a week at eighty an hour, and each time I manage to read the name an instant before the speed erases it.
At first I paid it no attention. Then I began to wait for the moment. The platform always empty, the clock stopped at an hour that is no hour at all, the wooden bench under a tin roof that rains inside when it rains outside.
One winter afternoon I saw someone. A man in a long coat, standing at the edge, watching my train go by the way you watch the sea: expecting nothing from it. Our eyes met for less than a second. There was no time for more.
Ever since, I look for him. He is not always there. But when he is, something in me stops even though the train does not, and for an instant we are two still people in a world that races, holding each other up by the gaze over a platform neither of us will ever reach.
I have thought about getting off at the next city and walking back along the tracks. Asking him what he is waiting for. But I know that if I did, the station would stop being the only place in the world where something, however brief, still happens to me.