[Originally composed 9/12/07 09:58 am]
On a chilly October morning with flushed cheeks and a cold nose, I lowered the stitched, flower-printed suitcase into the trunk of my car. It looked like it had come from some second-hand store, and as if it was made out of a cheap, second-hand couch. It was an ugly suitcase. The sky was an overcast gray, and there was frost on my windshield when I started the car. I rolled slowly out of the long, winding driveway, pulled onto the dirt road surrounded by barren cornfields, and adjusted my rear view mirror.
Even on such a gloomy day, she was wearing dark, oil-spill sunglasses and wearing blood red lipstick that stained her cigarette with a crimson melancholy pucker. She stared off into the distance, looking at nothing, because that's what surrounded the tiny car in the middle of these vast, boundless acres. She was wearing almost all black, and if I didn't know any better, I'd think she was on her way to her husband's funeral.
It was a long trip to the city, and an even longer trip to the train station. For hours she stared out that window, unknowing that I was watching her from my rearview mirror. From time to time, a lone tear would roll down her cheek like a raindrop on a wet window, and she would blot it up with a piece of white tissue, now stained marble from the mascara. Two hours of silence. Neither of us were speaking, because we'd already said all that there was to say. Still, I was dying to know if the silence was crushing her as bad as it was crushing me. As we entered the edge of the city, I spoke.
"Say something." She remained motionless, still gazing out the window in the same, sullen slouch.
"There are so many smokestacks." And they were all pouring black smoke. Reaching sky high for what seemed like miles around us, they were large fingers protruding from the cold ground that would claw everything in their grip and pull them to the center of the Earth. Swallowed whole with no evidence left behind. And that was all she said to me before I dropped her off for the train due West. I never saw her eyes again, for she never removed her sunglasses. I used to get lost in them, but as of today they would be forever pointed Westbound.
