Once

She’d heard his name spoken throughout the morning. It wasn’t unusual; it was the way they enounced it that struck her. The men and the women alike, they said his name with too much breath and too much music, as if he were a protagonist of the wedding and not just a part of the chorus. He was only the best man’s younger brother, yet even the groom asked when he would arrive and less discreetly the bride did not.

“Why don’t you go to meet him?” her friend had said to her and her smile was a dare or perhaps a gift.

The train stop was at the end of a path that walked down through a field to a platform that was bare but for the sign that marked it. When the train pulled in she was still walking up through the field and the sun was full in her face. With a hand raised to shield her eyes she saw the door opened and a dark shabby suitcase flung out onto the grass. When a cloud hid the sun she could see the man standing in the doorway of the train. She saw him take one step down and pause and everything else paused too as she watched his face look for the face he knew would come to meet him. And because she was the only other person in the field and the only other person in the world he knew she had come for him and everything in his face changed because of it and he smiled at her and waved and when she smiled and waved back he smiled and waved back more.

And now, when she cannot remember her own name or even his, when all the rooms of her memory have been sacked of possessions and even the mice that scuttled under the floorboards are stiff and dead in their traps and there is nothing but the bare and silent boards, even now there is still sometimes again the sun in her eyes and a suitcase thrown down to the ground without care and a man’s face before he has seen her and the world stopping just at that moment, time stopping so that what was only a second becomes infinite, eternity (all of it) held in that moment, just before he steps down from the train.