Welcome Noah, We Missed You

I’ll start now, even though I know I could have never saved you. I’ll go back to the beginning, and figure it out, because I should’ve known, how could I not have? I remember everything, every moment since the day we met, because you changed my life. In one blinking second you saved me, and you never even knew.

I was standing on the Metra Platform, and I’d been standing there a while, but I knew the train would come barreling into the station at one o’clock, and you showed up seconds before it did. You stepped in front of me, blocking my line of view to the tracks, and I thought, my first thought, was that you were beautiful, and not in an older, I-hope-that’s-how-my-wife-looks kind of way. You were beautiful in a very apparent, very my age, and very tangible kind of way. And you stepped right in front of me.

“Do you know what train this is?” I stared at you, because you couldn’t possibly be speaking to me, not when you were that beautiful, and I was just me, Noah. And no one ever talked to me. You kind of laughed, like you didn’t understand why I was just staring. “I mean, where it’s going?”

“Chicago,” I responded, shifting so I could see the train that had now stopped behind you. Except I still hadn’t thought the most obvious, that you had stopped me because you’d stepped in front of me and treated me like a human. It was cool that day, sunny but a chilly wind picked up your blonde hair and tossed it around your face.

You brushed it back, and moved so you were beside me, facing the train. Your movements had seemed easy, like we were long time friends. I didn’t know your name, but I wanted to then. “I’m trying to get to Harlem Avenue,” you said, squinting at the train.

“Oh, that’s the next train, it should be coming in soon,” I responded, and you looked at me then, your eyes were blue but not like mine. Yours were very light, and airy, almost iridescent. “What train are you taking?” you asked quickly, and I don’t know why I said it, maybe because I knew that if I did I would have more time with you.

“The next one.” And you smiled at me, content with that answer, and then you’d asked, “Did you get your ticket yet?” I shook my head, because I’d never actually intended on taking the train into Chicago today, and I hoped my parents wouldn’t worry about me. But then I thought that either way they would have been worrying today, and that made me feel lighter.

You walked off to the ticket machine without saying anything; I followed after you because you were always the leader, even then. It was ten minutes before our train came in, and I let you get on first before following. You looked disheveled, like you’d never been on a train before, and I led you down the aisle to an empty bench, and you took the window seat. We sat in silence until the train started, and then you faced me, and held up your hand. “I’m Sawyer, by the way.”

I noticed your nails when I went to shake your hand. They were painted like the Russian flag, which was something I’d been able to recognize, and you knew because you took pleasuring in studying foreign countries. You also liked to do your nails – I learned that later. “And you are?” You had laughed. You laughed a lot, and it made me want to laugh, and be lighter. I managed somehow to say “Noah” and you nodded your head like you were tucking my name away in a pocket of your brain. And I knew then that I would always be Noah to you, not Poindexter, or Fag, or anything but Noah. And that was all I could really ask from anyone in that moment. That’s how you saved me.

And I know you thought meeting me there had changed your life, but it changed mine too even though you never knew. You were the first person in a long time to treat me like a human, and it made me reconsider everything I had planned to do. Oh god Sawyer, I think about all of this now, and I wonder if I had told you would it have changed anything? If you only knew how much you had really meant to me. Sawyer, I have to tell you now even though it doesn’t matter.

That day, that first day we’d met in the dawn of winter, I wasn’t on that platform to get on the one o’clock train to Chicago. I was there to throw myself in front of it.