A girl sits alone on a train rumbling towards a destination she did not choose, leaning her head against the window. Her head thumps with the vibrations from the glass, each little bump a small punishment she gives to herself.
"May I sit?"
She does not bother with a proper reply, merely blinking in acknowledgement.
She takes out a pen and writes his name in thick black ink that bleeds into the minute crevices of her skin, the three thousand words that she thinks could possibly encompass even the tiniest page of the epic that was him. She prints multiple exclamation points to mark the way her heart would jump and sink and scrawls dozens of question marks to give some tangibility to an uncertain future.
A bump in the tracks causes her hand to slip and creates a slash across her handiwork.
She looks up at the sound of an abrupt click.
"Film camera. Sorry," the boy across from her grins sheepishly and puts away his camera, a heavy black thing of metal and the past. She could've sworn he took a photo of her.
"Why film?" she ventures, figuring she might as well try to make conversation to save herself from returning to self-pity and the terrible task of reliving memories she will never be able to recreate. 849Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ2jH8E7DmP1
"Film cameras teach you to live in the moment. You can't delete photos or edit them. You often can't go back to the moment so you basically only have one shot."
The girl lets a tiny smile grace her lips and turns back to the window. The train is rushing through a forest. She remembers, how they used to have picnics in the park. He'd push the hair that fell in her face back and tuck it behind her ear, sometimes swooping in with a feather-like kiss on the cheek or forehead, before turning back to his book. He'd lean them both against a tree, catch her hand in his and trace the fine lines on her palm with his finger, staring at them with the intensity of a fortune-teller, finally telling her that he saw a future for them together, building castles in the air until they both fell asleep with the pink-streaked sky as a backdrop.
The girl gets up with a sigh and hauls herself to the cramped bathroom car at the rear of the train. She turns on the tap and sticks her hand into the stream of cold water. The ink which held his name, his likeness, her longing, washes away into a pool of murky black, staining the white porcelain of the sink.
Her skin is clean by the time she returns to her seat.
"Give me your email address. I'll send the photo I took after its developed," the boy offers shyly. She grins and trades contacts with him.849Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡh366gyJdrE
Her phone lights up silently in her bag.
1 voice message.
"I miss you."
ns 172.69.7.8da2
and then Add to home screen.