Late Wednesday night Melbourne Train Girl stood at Parliament Station waiting for the train. She had missed the previous one by exactly thirteen seconds. The doors had closed and the train had pulled away just as she reached the bottom of the escalator. The next train was thirty minutes away.
To pass the time, Melbourne Train Girl had taken the two escalators back up to the station entrance. The second escalator is very long and very steep, and Melbourne Train Girl likes to stand, looking right up at where it ends, far above her. It is so steep that it feels like she is travelling horizontally. Once she had arrived at the top she turned back around and proceeded down to the platform again.
She had stood on the platform next to a woman wearing purple socks for the remaining seventeen minutes.
The train had arrived, and she had sat on the floor near the door with her Wednesday cases and bags around her. There were no seats left. They were all taken up by pairs of people falling asleep on each others shoulders. There was a couple by the door opposite her. He had held onto her arm much too tightly, as if afraid someone would come and steal her away. Even when she went to look at the map of stations on the wall he kept his grip firm. If Melbourne Train Girl were that girl she would have told him off. She then would have gone and stood defiantly next to the cute boy towards the back of the carriage. This girl just stood. Perhaps she liked it.
Her car was much too far from the station.
And the night was much too cold.
Melbourne Train Girl's smile has been slowly wearing off...
She had met the Tall Boy for lunch on Monday. It was over much too soon. Now it is Friday and she wants to call him, but she has called him much too much. Which isn't very much at all, but much more than he has called her. It is now Friday, and Monday was too long ago.
This morning, she woke to her phone ringing. Too tired to answer it, she let it ring out. She lay for a while, and then the thought that it could have been him calling her bobbed to the surface of her sleepy mind. Her room was cold, but she threw off her blankets anyway and stood shivvering, in only a pair of underpants, listening to her voicemail.
It wasn't him.
It was a friend, older and wiser than her in the ways of love.
She sent him an SMS, and told him she was hoping he was the Tall Boy.
He replied and told her she should just call the Tall Boy. "What have you got to lose?", he had said.
As Melbourne Train Girl's finger hesitates over the call button on her mobile, she thinks she should stop taking advice from friends.
