On this train noone is telling me a story. The girl across from me, her face is closed down to two vertical lines between her eyebrows and I wonder if she is in pain. That man with the sunken face is staring blankly, unblinking. I look at the girl next to me and she shifts her book away from me to keep me from thieving a read, but it’s a book I’ve read already, a book I own.

So I think about my friends, how they tell the stories of themselves, how they illuminate their childhood selves like a flash bulb going off in the dark revealing for a single awesome moment the bottom of a tiny pink foot, the small hand clutching the suitcase handle, the spinning spinning and falling into the grass drunk on joy.