The circular grab handles on the Kyoto rail are made of glazed, lemon-yellow plastic; they hang from thick, sturdy fabric straps of the same color. I watch them sway back and forth with the movement of the train, like burnished, distracted leaves caught in the gentle stirring of an incoming storm.
Next to me, Strawberry sighs audibly. Between us, our relationship comes to life as an emergent property of our combined feelings; I imagine it suddenly externalized as a ring of citrine, like one of the train grab handles, dangled within my reach by a god of love and melodrama. “Take it,” he calls fervently, and the ring, as though suspended on an invisible string held by this god, shakes violently with enthusiasm.
I look up at the train’s ceiling; dark, forest green metal buckled together with fist-sized rivets, but curved like the inside of a church. The observation spirals, and a religion begins inside the train car. A statue of David shrouded in the the red, blue, and yellow of the route maps. A priest in a school uniform, playing Tetris on a cracked, gold Apple product. The gospel ringing out as we approach the station. Joan of Arc, dissolute, and drunk as a skunk. Lambs, leopards, and other sacrificial animals sitting mutely in the fetid, plush seats. I look back at the ring hung between me and Strawberry. Is it a flotation device, or an eject button?
It’s nighttime when we pull into the last stop. The laminated plastic is peeling at the corners of my train card, which I finger obsessively in my pocket. Outside, I am seized by a vision of summer in the depths of this autumn as tears well in Strawberry’s eyes. The yellow ring has followed us from the train, and it bobs expectantly in the air behind him, inside my line of vision. The temptation to curl a fist around it and yank it down reaches its apex. To be lifted up and carried away like a soul at the end point of a linear cosmology. The great escape. The ultimate fate. Instead, I fold up like a dried flower, and place myself in his arms. The righteousness of this decision I will never know; but at least, it is healing.
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