A tear on an elbow

There are moments in complete stillness where I feel truly alive.

It’s strange, because recently I’ve felt them appear in the most unlikely places. One could imagine that stillness is something that arises when you walk along a sandy beach in early morning light. Birds surfing the calm breeze. Pink light shimmering and covering all in a warm protective shield. Or one could imagine stillness to appear in a dark green forest, creaking wood, the smell of clean nature filling the lungs. But no, none of those spaces is where I have felt that missing feeling of a harmonic common journey through time. It happened in rather the opposite space actually. 

This morning I was commuting to work as I always do. It’s a stressful odyssey of economic sections, human energy fields, penning flesh and exchanging air with both lungs and machines. The very idea of closing my door and dragging my feet to the starting point of this dreadful everyday journey towards nothing makes my whole existence implode. 

That’s why today felt so incomprehensible. I was sitting on the train, squeezed in between a humming rounded woman with soft arms and two teenage girls sharing a seat, moving around like two snakes trying to find a perfect position but never getting there. The noisy ambiance made me put on my headphones and I randomly started a radio station. A tune. A melody somewhere from a memory. Beautiful chords and harmonies. And that is when it happened, the stillness. It felt like the train stood still in time. I looked around me and saw humans, others with delicate minds, fragile concerns and free imagination. We were all travelling together. Towards the dullness or towards the unknown. A tear fell down my cheek. It landed on the round woman's elbow, but I don’t think she noticed.