Unplugged

So.

Okay.

I bust on the metro line to get to work, and of course, on the metro train, what are there? People, right?

Not really. What's on the metro train, are people, yes, but people consumed by ... anything distracting. It's like a picture right out of Fahrenheit 451, everybody on the train, listening to their iPods, reading their iBooks, doing anything to fill the time ... and people thought Ray Bradbury wrote science fiction.

Well, everybody except one person.

Me.

I decided, paradoxically, to ... unplug. I decided to take this time to, well: collect myself before I went into work, and look out the window, and see cars and trees passing by, and look in the car and see people, and see what they are doing.

Me ... and somebody else.

There was a girl.

She was ... maybe ten years old, seated next to her mother, her mother who was engrossed in her iPhone, but she wasn't. She ...

She had long auburn hair, curled near the tips because of this oppressive heat and humidity, bronzed skin, and crystal blue eyes that stared right into your soul ...

... Right into my soul.

She had a decided air. An air of a girl, so strong, so beautiful, so smart, knowing that she was head and shoulders above everybody on the train, in the whole damn country, in fact.

What will happen to this girl, I wondered.

I mean: who's going to be the lucky guy who gets her? And will he be strong enough to handle her, even for one day, when she grows up and comes out into the world?

Or, will she even make it? Will she see the world, and all its absurdity and ... and do what? Know that there's nothing she can to to change it? So remove herself from the equation? A world so set in its ways, everybody obliviously listening to their iwhatevers, trapped inside a train as it speeds off the edge of the cliff, and not caring one whit because their senses are filled with meaningless drivel? Hopeless to change a world without hope?

Or will she play the game? See the world for what it truly is, and laugh at it, and put a boy under her thumb and make him the president of IBM or Microsoft or of the United States of America, and run the country from the sidelines by proxy (because she knows nobody ever listens to a woman)? Or say 'Hell with it,' and build her own empire from scratch, and fight and fight and fight, and force a world to be the way she wants it to be?

Why did I even bother even asking that last question?

And that was the look on that girl's face: why am I even bothering?

She looked around disdainfully at all of us, all so engrossed in filling our time and our minds with trivia, and read us, and the world, and shrugged.

And she saw me. She saw me, seeing her.

So I looked away. I tried not to blush. I 'didn't' look at her again. I mean, she was always in my peripheral vision, so I saw her, surveying the world and its vanity.

And I wondered. Does she wonder what it'll be like for her? I mean, she knows what it is now for her ...

GOD! she's so mature, for such a slim, elfin, young girl, elegantly dressed in tailored blue jeans and bejeweled flip-flops, so refined.

It's like as if she's given up on her childhood, or has had it stolen from her.

So I wondered if she wondered what it was like to be me, at my age, with my responsibilities, and was pining to skip past all this ... 'stuff' ... when she's not allowed to do anything of her own, but she knows she's already far more capable to handle any- and every-thing thrown her way, and so much better than anybody else in the train car.

As you see, I don't wonder what it's like to be her .. I mean, I don't pine for it ... to be a young girl again, going into high school and dealing with all my bullshit friends with their bullshit problems ... homework? what other people think of you?

As if any of that had any weight in the matter.

I don't miss that age.

No: I am missing what that age could've been for me ... where I could've been just a girl, a smart girl, a sweet girl, a beautiful girl, and where mommy could've held me if things got too complicated and I could've been a girl that could've asked mommy to hold me, or mommy could've just known, and just held me, even as I screamed and fought her embrace, and cried and cried and cried at all the meaningless of it all, and the weightiness of it. I could've been that girl who ... lived ... and smiled and was happy, and when she wasn't, cried, and was held.

I miss that. I did miss it, entirely, in fact.

And, ... I think this girl, in front of me, so self-possessed, is missing it, too.

So I pray for her ... that maybe she'll wake up from her ... knowing everything about everybody and seeing the vanity of it all, knowing that she's better than, and so being forced to be better than, because she knows it. I pray that she can just let it all go, some time, maybe all the time, and be a young, sweet, beautiful girl, who can break out into a smile, ... despite it all, or who can cry, in spite of it all, and reach out to be held, and be held, and loved.

I'm talking about the girl on the train ... I mean the girl I saw on the train.

I'm not talking about the girl in the mirror.

Really.

... *sigh* oh, well, ... another day.