Found on Frozen Tracks

He was still standing by the window when I came in with the tea. Taller than I first noticed, but looking like he was waiting for permission even to breathe. His hands recoiled from the hot mug and I remembered I never asked him how long he’d waited out in the cold. He said he didn’t check the train schedule and it ended up being hours.

The mug stayed on the table, steam rising to warm his face more gently. There was no fire at the station, and it’d be at least an hour before the police arrived to take him off somewhere. The woman in the break room called me a hero. I thought I was going to be late to my train. I had checked the schedule.

The engines all around us took their turns coming and going, but for the time being we were stationary.

“What’s your name?” I finally asked, out of curiosity, not a deliberate attempt to make conversation. But as it goes, one began anyway. He told it to me, and I forgot it. Then he must have asked me mine, too.

He looked at the mug. “Do you want this?” he asked me. I didn’t like him then, because I’d spent the three minutes in the break room with that woman just to make him a hot drink after finding him half-frozen on the train tracks, and he didn’t care for it at all.

I don’t know if I was meant to like him. After all, our relationship was hardly a conventional one. It will be over soon, I thought, and we will cease to care about each other.

I sat with him until the police arrived because the woman in the break room had gone back to the ticket booth, and, like it or not, I was the only one disposable to make sure he didn’t end up on the tracks again.

I found out a lot about him, like how his sister used to own the same scarf I had on, and how he used to drink fruit tea when he was younger, but only with a lot of sugar, and he stopped because he no longer ate sugar at all. He showed me his perfect white teeth as proof and I thought they would have been a waste littered over the gravel between the tracks. But that didn’t mean I liked him at all. There’s a difference between liking someone, and not wanting them to stop living.

I probably told him about me as well, but I doubt he took an interest. After all, I gave no indication of wanting to die at the time. He was taken away, and I was free to leave as well. Nobody else called me a hero. Not like I expected it or anything, but the fuss was all around him once it was more than us two on the room. I didn’t like him, but I missed him when he left.

Well, I went on about my day, careful on the frozen steps and the ledge down from the platform. The night was turning purple, his favorite color, as I laid down. Golden light made the snow look less cold. I took off my scarf.

The tracks were smooth on either side of me.