Change the Channel or Rewrite the Ending

I walked up the stairs to the elevated platform and checked to see if the train was nearby. In the distance I saw it crawling my way and I sighed.

The usual suspects on the platform, the school kids, the Spanish workmen, the statuesque Eastern European woman who left her smile somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.

I won’t judge, but I do judge way too much. “You never know the battles people are waging internally or the ones they have overcome or been beaten by.”

The train stops along the way, avenue N, Bay Parkway…at 18th avenue two Orthodox Jewish ladies walk on and they sit beside two Islamic women. They are each wearing the appropriate clothing in line with their beliefs. They smile at each other and then continue their conversations.

The old man sitting across from me seems lost in a dream or perhaps imprisoned by a memory or two. He is holding a folded newspaper, which he abandoned as he opened it to read.

Something strange happens when a man who is in his twenties turns 60 years of age. A sense of confusion, a dramatic soul shift and a sense of crashing a black tie invitation only event, dressed in jeans, a tee shirt and sneakers. You feel like you are invisible, but your thoughts are written across your heart, in your eyes.

I wake from this time traveling confusion only to see the old man sitting across from me.

“It’s alright,” he says with a knowing smile, “no one understands it.”

The Jewish and Islamic women are conversing and seem to be in a conspiratorial secret conversation.

The old man laughs to himself, mutters, “I’ve seen this movie already, change the channel or rewrite the ending.”

I don’t understand as we stop at Jay Street and people run off to make the train across the platform which closes its doors just as they get there.

A black mother walks on with her daughter, who motions her to sit beside her. The mother, her love spilling from her eyes, smiles and says, “we are getting off in two stops” — and sits beside her anyway.

It’s a never ending river, “time.” You know the streams of birth, life and death. In between, that’s where the reasons are forged and the questions are born.

I get to my stop at West 4th, I climb the stairs with hundreds of strangers and the internal, eternal, questions begin again.