Missing you miss your train.

You picked up the one way ticket

From inside your wallet

And you put your hands too far away

From the small of my back

I told myself that I wouldn’t look. That I wouldn’t open my eyes and see the hands that I held behind the glass.

So I wouldn’t remember, in the future, the past moment, forever replaying the drop and fall of the fingers and the opening of the doors and then klink closing again.

You were on track, on time to take a different track. The train takes you where it wants to because it has all the power of steel and all the gleam of lacquer. It learnt to roll before it could crawl. I don’t think they would have been proud though, the Tophats I mean, there is no way of letting off steam when you run on electricity.

Everyone sat. Apart from those who stood. I didn’t know which was better so I just ran.

I couldn’t know how you left. Whether you nearly smiled, or had goodbye eyes, or whether you sat in a window seat or an aisle seat or silent screen window mouthed to people who don’t know you, asking whether you could sit next to them.

They wouldn’t know how you like to sit by the window and watch the trees slide their autumn leaves past your outside-to-inside blushing cheek.

When I reached the steps I sat and waited

You would come round the corner in a second

For sure

Just any second

Any second now...