When the garlands are knotted, we know then that love has died. As I boarded the train, I clenched my ticket with the intention to shatter its fragile self but it was not there. I clenched my fist instead, wringing the phalanges until my hands bore white and ran numb. My blood shot up to my face and I dreamed not of the inspector letting me stay, but kicking me out. Perhaps he would spit on me or tell me, ‘Get lost and never return.’ I wanted some risk, because all of life was risk and risk and risk, and I never got any reward. I wanted the reward suited for me, something someone of my nature deserves. Someone who played life as though it were a game, a game where they were not the protagonist or the villain or even the wise mentor who dies in the name of character development, but who is the speck of dirt blending in as a mere pixel on the farm landscape, or the single blot of blood splattering the corpse of the beloved. She who remains talented in having no talents, unequivocally unprepared for what expects all. The same routine of letting life consume me instead of I with life, leaving the door with tattered rags and a sorry excuse for a face every single morning.

‘Where’s your ticket, sweetheart?’ A woman with a kind-face and hair that shoots out in a tidy manner looks down at me. She doesn’t mind that I fidget, or that my face blanches.

‘I-’ I cringe at the pathetic nature of my voice. I so rarely expose my words when I am surrounded by others and so my voice develops a croaky, unclear sort of manner of speaking. ‘I lost it.’

‘How old are you, dear? Where are your parents?’ She asks, and I can feel the kindness dissipating with every second my mouth remains shut.

‘Eighteen,’ I manage to say. ‘They’re at home.’ 

‘Oh.’ The woman gets this kind of curl in her voice. ‘Sweetie, you should know better. Get off at the next stop, or I’ll call the police.’

‘S-sure.’ I muster, and god, what a pathetic thing to say. Not even an attempt to fight back or pull her hair or rip her teeth or slap her. I take it lying down, standing up, on the floor. I feel the heat rising in me, but it’s futile. ‘I’ll have you know-’

‘Shut up,’ someone calls, and I don’t even dare whip my head around to see because what if they’re Medusa and I die from their stare. My words then die in their place and for the next ten minutes I stare only at the ground, littered with disgustingly small dots and crusted over with substances I can’t even identify. 

The conductor halts the train. 

The monotonously plastered sign reading “Newark Penn Station” sits outside of the train. I gather myself, my only possession, and head out the door. As I walk I wonder what would happen if the doors crushed me before I could leave. I then realize that that’s a ghastly thought and I should perhaps never think again. 

I spot a bench in another area of the station and make a beeline towards it. I wonder what my parents are thinking. Unlike every other time when I go out, I didn’t keep my phone on me. In fact, I didn’t keep more than a five dollar bill in my coat pocket. I told myself it’s because my phone died since I didn’t charge it the other night and I could only grab five dollars and I forgot my credit card at home. But I know in my heart that’s not true. At four in the morning I woke up with the intention to leave. Now if at that point in time I ever made the intention to come back, I don’t know. I walk through the station, pushing past anxious-looking people and less-anxious-looking people. My bodily instincts force me to clutch up around the latter, but there’s nothing sexy about me. With a square face and the nose of a parrot and a body like a cardboard box, I’m about as appealing as dryer lint. Still I’m covered head to toe in winter gear, mostly because it’s winter and half because I want to be hidden, and I take a seat and stare at the shining digital boards that read out the upcoming trains. They go all the way up until seven a.m., which I think is too ambitious. The blaring digital quality of the screen irks me; it reminds me too much of the hand-held devices and the big screen and the littler screen which consumed my life, which made me as talentless and disturbed as I am. Or perhaps I made myself this way. I forged myself out of shoddy metal and no sense of self-preservation, not even in the face of death. 

It’s like another side is clawing in me, and it compels me to get up for who knows why. I approached the booth where a clearly underpaid worker sat. He looks to be in his late thirties and I don’t know if it’s the effect of being single since birth or never talking to a man outside my father, but this man makes my knees buckle. His mousy brown hair looks almost like a golden blond underneath the single incandescence that encompasses him. 

I’ve approached him but he doesn’t look up. Clearly he knows no good characters are awake at four thirty in the morning, and I’m still deciding just how right he is about that when it comes to me.

‘Hello?’ I say with confidence I never had with the kind-looking woman. Maybe it’s the meanness in this man’s eyes.

‘Can I help you?’ He shifts his gaze towards me, but only locks eyes with me once. His eyes are green but the station is so depressing that they seem gray. 

‘I’m,’ I started to say, but now I’m panicking on how to say it. ‘Well, I’m kind of lost. I need to call my parents.’

‘Don’t you have a phone?” he says, like it’s natural for him to do so. He’s not making eye contact.

‘No,’ I say, and feeling adventurous, I continue. ‘I don’t have any money either.’

‘OK, so?’ He says, again like it’s the only thing he’s ever meant to say.

‘I’m ei – I’m sixteen.’ I lie, and it’s probably the smartest thing I’ve done all day. It’s the only thing that has startled him. ‘I ran away from home but I want to go back.’

‘Ran away from home, huh?’ He finally looks at me, as if now I’m worthy of his gaze. ‘Your mom and dad must be worried sick.’

‘Yeah,’ I say, and he’s probably right. My parents are worried – well, they have been worried about me for the longest time. 

‘Well, the police can give you a ride to the station.’ My eyes widened. ‘There, your parents can–’

‘No!’ I exclaim, and then internally curse at myself. ‘I mean.’ I compose myself. ‘S-sure. That’s fine, yes.’ I didn’t want to tell him that having my parents pick up their supposedly-good daughter sounds like hell on Earth, but I realize it’s even more suspicious if I do. I bite down on my tongue hard when I stop talking, and I can taste blood. It feels like karma. 

The man raises his right eyebrow, an eyebrow that’s so light I don’t even notice that it was raised until he says, ‘OK then.’

‘Thank,’ there’s a frog in my throat so I have to clear it before I finish, and it’s a bit pathetic that I couldn’t even muster out one phrase before my voice gave out, ‘you.’

‘Sure,’ The man says, and he makes eye contact with me for the last time before picking up his phone and dialing. 

Except suddenly, his voice just sounds like bells. Not the good, sweet, romantic kind, the kind of treatment male leads get in rom-coms. No, his voice starts to sound like an undulating ringing, and I start to feel like the ground is shaking. Or maybe, I’m shaking. In any case, my vision starts to blur, fading in and out, and eventually everyone and everything is turning yellow. The man’s mousy-brown-dirty-blond hair is yellow and his green-gray eyes are yellow and my hands are yellow and the booth is yellow. At that moment, I’ve never been more reminded of why I hate the color yellow.

One thing I can see before the yellow fades to black is the man suddenly jerking up, opening his mouth, furrowing his eyebrows, and widening his eyes so big that they seem like white globes. I smile, but I’m sure I’m not smiling on the outside. I smile because someone is concerned for me, and yeah it’s someone who probably couldn’t care less if I became roadkill under the rail tracks, but it’s still nice. 

I don’t know why but I’m reminded of why my mom says breakfast is the most important meal of the day and when my dad says it’s a shame to skip meals. 

~

I wake up in a bed, which is fine normally because I always wake up in a bed, but it becomes less fine when I realize that it’s not my bed. I’m not in my room at all. The white and clattering and commotion of “my” room is so strange that it doesn’t take long for me to realize where I am. 

The hospital.

And ironically, the hospital where I spent most of my summer before junior year volunteering at. 

I was a different person back then.

I was so…peppy, quirky, and boisterous. When people yelled at me, I cowered like a scared deer but that almost never happened. 

It was back when I had dreams.

I thought one day I would be one of the doctors I occasionally saw walk in and out of patient rooms. I thought I could save, protect, and help. I thought after years of studying and hard work, I’d get to a point where I could even come close to people like that.

Now I have nightmares of people from my past.

In all of my nightmares, events unfold in the same, somewhat predictable way. I’ll meet a person from my past, and they’ll seem nice. But then everything switches to this omniscient third-person view, and I see that person scheming and conspiring. 

And they want to kill me. Or they want to give me drugs. 

But I always say no. To everything. It’s in those nightmares that I uncover a true sense of myself: I want to keep living and I want to prosper. Deep down, like really deep down, I know what’s wrong for me. Yet somehow I can’t discern it when I’m awake and out of my fantasies. I recognize what’s bad because it’s easy, almost like child’s play. But that critical thinking flies out the window the moment I become conscious.

‘Good, you’re awake,’ A woman wearing what I know to be nursing scrubs says in a catty way, or maybe I just think she’s saying it like that. Everyone says that nurses are just overgrown high school bullies, but I’m still in high school so I have no idea. ‘How’re you feeling, darling?’

‘OK,’ I say, and it’s not true, but I say it because I don’t want her to worry.

‘That’s great, sweetheart,’ and there she is calling me a name I’m not worthy of. ‘Your mom and dad are here to see you, do you want them to come up?’

I don’t know what’s running through my head, but I ask, ‘Where am I?’ as if I don’t already know.

‘You’re in the hospital, dear,’ She says, and I’m sure her patience is running out because I just ignored her real question. ‘Want mom and dad here?’

‘OK,’ I say, and it’s true this time because I really want them to yell at me and tell me I’m an awful daughter and ignore me for the rest of their lives, since it’s what I deserve. 

But instead, when my parents walk in, they’re silent. And I’m mad, but I don’t say anything. In fact, none of us say anything for a good minute. 

‘Why?’ My mother asks, breaking the silence and pleading in such a way that I’m overwhelmed with pity. ‘Why did you do this?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say, and it’s the truth. Maybe I wanted to leave, but I had no plan after that. I never usually do.

‘If something’s wrong,’ my dad starts, ‘you should just tell us. You know we’ll never get mad at you.’

He’s right, and, I mean, he’s always been right. I start scrambling. ‘Well, I’ve started feeling this pain in my…well, it’s been in my, er…’

‘The doctor said your vitals are fine.’ my mom says, and I wince at the word “doctor.” ‘There’s something wrong with you, mentally. Should we take you to a psychiatrist’s office?’

‘No, no!’ I plead. ‘Can we just go home?’

‘Not until you tell us what’s wrong,’ my dad says, and tears are welling in his eyes. ‘We already lost one kid, we don’t want to lose another.’ He says, but it’s more like something he chokes out. 

I hate this. My whole life, my parents have left me alone. I hate bringing things to their attention, only if it’s bad things like these. Why can’t I just be a good child?

‘I’m sorry,’ I start out, and I don’t intend on crying, but it happens anyway. ‘I’m really, really sorry. Can we go home? I don’t want to be here anymore.’

‘OK,’ my mom says. ‘OK,’ she repeats, almost like she’s unsure if I can even understand anymore. 

I tell myself that day, I will never make my parents worry like they did. Their gray hair seemed to quadruple in amount when I saw them.

And to this day,

Even as I send money to them,

Thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars,

And I see that smile, and I see my smile

In photographs of Banaras, Kathmandu, Kolkata,

I’ve never forgotten the girl who boarded the train.

I hope she found

The station she was looking for.