![]() I pressed the button and the automated voice listed the train times in a self-righteous voice. I found one of those speakers where you press the button and it lists how long before each train arrives. …When I got to the station I strode around confidently for a while, before asking a lady which platform to go to. …Just don’t get on a train to Noarlunga.” Good advice good advice. You won’t be able to tell which platform. There were no actual signs on the platforms, he said. I had already spent the last ten minutes realizing that my boyfriend had in fact been right, when he told me about the trains, before I left. What if no one else got on or off? What if it started moving while I had my leg in the door? I had never caught a train in this city before. What would happen when the train came? Being at a halfway stop, it was unlikely the train would stop for long. I watched her flicking her bus ticket between her fingers. I wondered if she always caught the train. Are they wondering about what I’m thinking? Are they aware that I’m aware of them? I hoped that I hadn’t moved away too much when the girl sat down. In public I spend a lot of my time trying to act neutral and not bother them them, the others, the people around me, while wondering if they are projecting onto me too. I wondered what the girl to my right was thinking. I was also thinking that it was too bright and that my skin was sticky with the heat. In today’s daze I didn’t think I was thinking, I thought I was quite possibly reading, but then I realized I was thinking about reading, not reading. I carried it around with the intention of reading, but then I only stared at the pages because I was in a daze of unthinking. The book was a pointless waste of weight in my bag because I never actually read it. It wasn’t pretend reading because I wasn’t pretending, but I may have well have been. I felt in control, someone who casually noticed strange phenomena in the midst of the mundane and didn’t even shrug. It wasn’t momentous, this secret broadcast of the cargo train but I felt happy for the experience it seemed like something that you might write about later on. It was the bellow and song of a crackly radio signal, or the boom from the sound of a loudspeaker drifting in the wind. ![]() But underneath the sound was another one. The cargo train was now at the peak of its noisiness. I glanced over and half-expected her to have her fingers in her ears. I contemplated putting my fingers in my ears. It came fully to my attention when its squealing became deafening. I was aware of its existence but had been tuning it out. A cargo train came clattering along the line across the road.
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