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The Ordinary Train Ride
“The ordinary train ride”
It was a cold, rainy night. He was about to take the last train from Munich to Berlin, hoping to arrive to his home city early morning and drink a cup of coffee from the coffee shop he used to go every day. Little did he know that this train ride would not be like many others he has had in the past years, always following a strict routine, a routine he has perfected over the years, without any room for surprises. One of the first things he does after hopping on the train is check for the twentieth time his ticket and make sure he knows exactly his seat number, even though he remembers it by heart. Once he arrived to his seat in a closed compartment, he settled down and hoped to fall asleep as soon as possible. After thirty minutes passed by, no one else had arrived to occupy the empty seats next to him and the train slowly started to move; he was happy not to share the space. He had just began to drift off when all of the sudden he was startled by a loud noise coming from the hallway, it sounded like someone dragging something really heavy, something that didn’t let the stranger move freely. He was torn between going out of the compartment to help this person or staying where he was to avoid an unknown situation, but he didn’t had to make any decision, suddenly the door opened and the most extravagant human being he had ever seen came in dragging a huge luggage and dropped it on the floor; she was wearing a sort of colorful furry cape, a hat bigger that the door and sun glasses, even though it was already dark outside. She could have been a hundred years old, by the look of her wrinkled face but she seemed to have more energy within herself that most of the young people he knew. She started speaking to him in a really strange language and taking things out from her sparkling bag; he had no idea what she was saying. A cat came out from her bag, a beautiful blue eyed cat that seemed to be as old as her; after the cat, it came a big brown book and without knowing how it happened, he found himself understanding all of her words and replying to her in the same weird language. She was explaining to him that she was in a hurry to get to an unpronounceable place and preferred to take the train, and just like that, the cat said that he preferred to travel on planes, but she never took his opinions in consideration. Had the cat really just said something? He just stared at him for a while, waiting to see if he would say anything else and a few seconds later, there it was again, the cat gave his opinion about which music the woman should play in her record player, and this time, she complied and played the song he wanted. With the music on, she went to sit next to him with the brown book on her arms and began to tell him many stories about her childhood and the strange characters she always came across when she did exactly the opposite of what was expected from her, she had so many stories to tell that it felt like they could have gone to China and back and never be over. While she told him all of these stories, she showed him all the photographs she kept inside the brown book, photos that represented perfectly what she said and that if one stared at them long enough, began to move, showing more than just an instant of the moment it was taken in; they became a movie that kept repeating itself in a continuous, never ending loop. In all of them there were a million different places, many of which he had never heard of or seen before this night and he realized he had never anywhere but his own country. How had that happened? She interrupted his dark thoughts by asking him to dance with her and even though he said he didn’t know how to, she ignored him and took his hand to start dancing. After the first few steps, he noticed they were flying and instead of freaking out, he started to sing at the top of his longs an opera that he had no idea existed. He had never felt better and was having the time of his life, when the lights inside the compartment came out because the train was going through a tunnel,
And then he woke up,
The train had just arrived to Berlin.
Teresa Arana
