Two waiting for the train

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really care.”

“Do you not have a ticket?”

“I do. I just can’t remember what it says.”

“Do you want to show it to me and I can tell you where you are going?”

“No. I don’t care.”

“You’re depressed.”

“You’re ingenious.”

"It will end.”

“It will not end.”

“You’re not chronically a drowning flap. You say all of this because your lenses are tarnished.”

“It doesn’t matter when a wave starts or ends because it is always coming from another and turning into yet another. It surges only to crash.”

“Do you want to fly?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because flying is not real. It is a delusion.”

“You are delusional right now.”

“So we are both delusional?”

“It seems so.”

“I don’t care.”

“Why are you waiting for this train if you don’t care about anything?”

“I guess I want to watch change out of a window.”

“That’s not nothing.”

“It is nothing for me.”

“You know they can’t see us, right?”

“You mean all of these people?”

“Yes.”

“I know. I don’t care.”

“Of course you care. You wouldn’t be here if they could see you. You would be elsewhere because you cannot bear to be seen by anyone but me right now. You are taking advantage of the fact.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“They’ll start to see the two of us eventually. It’ll be far more difficult to hide, if not impossible.”

“I’m not ready for that.”

“I can’t imagine it.”

“We are dormant now?”

“Yes, we are dormant.”

“And she doesn’t know about us?”

“She has no idea. But she will soon.”

“How do you know it is soon?”

“The air is moving in a way I’ve never felt it.”

“Are you worried for her?”

“She is strong. Can you not tell?”

“I can. But no one is strong suffocated underneath the entire world. You are strong. I am not.”

“Would you rather split vitality, or split time of vitality?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“If you and I were both moderate, we would be splitting our vitality. We would both be fifty percent. I would never experience the sublimity of living and you would never experience the sublimity of living if we had to divide it evenly between us. If you loved orange juice concentrate and had one box of concentrate and a glass of water to hydrate yourself, would you rather mix the two together to drink as orange juice, or keep them separated as the box of concentrate and the glass of water? A true concentrate lover would surely choose the latter.

“Most people never experience sublimity because they don’t ever give it all up. As soon as the concentrate and the water are combined, they are likewise tarnished. So it is with you and me. It is the absoluteness of each of us that creates something sublime.”

“I hate you.”

“I know you do.”

“She will be weaker than everyone else.”

“She will be weaker and she will be stronger than most people.”

“Why are we enduring all of this now just to be invisible?”

“Right now we are alone together. We are preparing. We can listen to conversations and read books behind commuters’ shoulders, and we can know when two strangers have crossed paths for the second time in one day if we continuously follow one of them. But we are alone like fallen angels. She doesn’t know us, and yet we live inside of her. We rub up against the clusters of her mind that she holds and throws around every day, and yet we have no impact on her experience of living. Sometimes I feel sad about how much we already care about her and how severely we will bruise her life, and how there is nothing we can do to prepare her for that. We can’t write a note, we can’t even communicate through a messenger. We are ghosts yet to be born. Here we are, somewhere in her head, somewhere on a train platform with anonymous figures and anonymous suitcases and anonymous puffs of smoke coming from everywhere, waiting to finally be seen, waiting to have responsibility at last. Everything has a surface to bounce off of. A sound off of an amphitheater, an idea off of another mind, a paintbrush off of a canvas, a pendant off of the skin between the lady’s collarbones when she is running, running late. But you and I only have each other from which to bounce off. No one knows of us, we have no physical mass, we have planted no memories in any minds.

“But we are about to metabolize someone’s entire world. We are to gnaw it up, vomit it out, switch it off and on. The moon hides from me, but shows herself to you, and soon I will see her and you will not. But this is not only black and white. It never has been, and it never will be. The peaks and troughs of a wave are not only opposites, they are of the very same material. They are the tiny blacks and whites of static, but they are also one gray, if one gazes from a distance.

“We are going to be revealed soon. I can feel it. You will feel it too when you recover, when you can feel the breeze again. It is to be the most important moment of our lives, our lives that have been embedded into hers like a single matryoshka doll hidden among the hidden soon to blow up and shatter all of the others that she has nurtured to familiarity.”

“What do we do until she realizes our existence?”

“We watch change outside the window, as you nicely put it. Come to terms with our imminently losing anonymity. After she comes to know us, we will never be anonymous again. She will manipulate our forms into every possible stature only to deform us like lab subjects, and adore and fetishize us and intermittently try to kill us with oblivion and substances.”

“This sounds dreadful.”

“Just a new kind of dreadful, plus tons of new accessories. Can you think of a preferable circumstance?”

“No.”

“Neither can I.”

“Are we taking the same train?”

“Of course we are. And here it comes.”