Standing still
His was a smile of shyness, a pleasure stolen but not without guilt. It was not so much a sense of having committed a crime; it wasn't as if we did anyone any harm — not with this smile, nor the smile immediately after, nor the one after that. But perhaps, it was more of having secretly broken an unspoken social code: the one that dictates strangers are not supposed to engage one another without a cause, or an excuse. Speaking is only permitted with reason, over the incessant rumble that could only be a train full of people battling inertia.
"Would you like my seat?" or "Can I borrow that paper if you're done with it?" "Excuse me, can I please get through? Thank you."
A smile without a precedence has no place here.
If these metal carriages are vessels in a city's bloodline, where would a city's heart lie?
And soon we joined the early morning flow of people drifting dreamily to the surface of the earth, swallowed by some kind of trance that a semblance of real life holds over them.
Posted by sniffles at February 02, 2007 08:11 PM