Riding the subway can be a party if you’re with someone, as long as you’re getting off at the same stop. Your station is coming up, though, and you’re in the middle of an excellent comment, but you’re losing your concentration. You can’t help wondering whether a graceful exit is possible from where the two of you are sitting to where the nearest door is. The effort to stay focused on being together, on noticing his interest in what you’re saying, isn’t it going to lead to taking a false step and ending up on the floor? You begin talking to yourself about it. Do you want to look like a tourist from a place without subways? This worry is distressing because, as you’re noticing just now, you care about him.

“Well, good-bye,” you say hurriedly and then attempt a solid stand-up despite the swaying car. You take heart. Because that’s only the first good-bye, as it turns out. You get on your feet, with one hand firmly grounding you, and set off toward that nearest door you wanted to reach before the train stopped with a jerk that can send you falling against a stranger not inclined to greet you with a smile, and you see that you have an opportunity to pause behind the other departing travellers and look back at him with a warm, graceful, secure-on-two-feet, although silent second good-bye. You get out and, avoid the people travelling into the doorway and the ones running across the platform, and congratulate yourself on a job athletically and companionably completed.

But you don’t. What will he think of you as his train moves on? You just stood there after a quick look and then turned away. After all the pleasure of companionship, how could you leave so easily? Was there no feeling in you?

At the horrible thought of being the cause of this sentimental disappointment, you start trying to find a place to stand and look back into the car. The doors opened on the left, and the two of you had been sitting on the right; at first, it’s hard to tell whether your seat had been taken, to see if he’s looking for you as much as you are wishing for one more chance at a good good-bye. Then you see. Your seat is still vacant. And he is sitting back, not digging for a cellphone to use or a book to read. But no sign of any seeking for a glimpse of you. You wave but expect no answer. That’s the third good-bye.

The fourth good-bye has its pleasures but they’re not easy to achieve. You hurry to get near the car’s window as the train pulls out. In order to share a humorous look with him as his train is starting up, you have to navigate through the others leaving the car, and one of them can be enough to make it impossible to get near so that you can touch the train’s skin of metal and glass, in lieu of a touch to the shoulder or cheek or hand. But you wave, and now the wave is beginning to ….

And that’s the fifth good-bye, as the car pulls out and cuts the ties between him and you. You want terribly to construct a hand signal of longing, but the talking and now the waving are finished for this trip. What matters now is the distance that is going on between you.

You turn away and back again. You think the train is making its sound of leaving the station and yet isn’t moving. If only he would call you to come back. You imagine a sixth good-bye. But if a possibility of going on together should ever appear, would it be consummated? Suppose he waves you back into the train, while there’s still time. Suppose there’s some kind of delay. What will you do? Get in?

Although you never saw it happen in person, you’ve always felt, and you feel now, that the good-byes of movie characters on train platforms demonstrated a standard of parting beyond other passenger machines. Everyone who’s seen Airplane! knows the complimentary parodying of train good-byes, with lots of eye-catching looks, and hands sometimes, and waving handkerchiefs and blowing kisses, and all that sort of thing belonging securely to the train. There’s a pause between the two realities of the stopped train and the one beginning to go. That one pushes its big nose forward, like a horse in a stakes race, and tries hard to leave the ones left behind left behind.

You’ve experienced that it doesn’t work at all with planes, and it’s not much good for cars, unless you’re not the one who’s driving. But moving to a city with a subway system, you thought the subway train, with its power source below ground, rivalled and perhaps even bettered the old trains. There was the promise of togetherness as it stopped remaining incredibly still after the first shuddering motion of departure.

That moment of clarification as to feelings. Its message is encouraging, isn’t it?

What made the fifth good-bye a great discovery was that for just a few moments, you could see your friend was settling comfortably into his seat.

And the sixth good-bye? He would be in the last window of the last car and waving to you, and you would wave back until the train was forcibly “disappeared” into its tunnel. And you were alone and also not alone.

 

Theresa Moritz’s stories and poems have appeared in magazines including Antigonish Review, Brick, Dalhousie Review, Dreamer’s Creative Writing, Capilano Review, Prism International, The Iowa Review, New Millennium Magazine, newpoetry,ca, Queen’s Quarterly, The Prairie Journal, TheRavensPerch, Squid, Traces Journal, The Windsor Review, and others. Some of her stories have received awards.