Train to My Heart

“I’ve missed you a lot, Kenah!” My younger sister, Jenna, tackled me into a hug before I had fully exited the train. She was sixteen, but she had taken the thirty minute journey to the train station alone. I had asked her to do it as a surprise since my parents had been slightly depressed since I had chosen to not come home for the past year and a half. I would be their Christmas gift, though I wasn’t sure if I was ready for the lecture I would get for my situation for James. They always took a liking for him, and even I had to admit that what I had done was wrong.

I held on to my sister’s little frame of a body and let the tears slip down my cheeks. Jenna didn’t seem to notice, until I could no longer hold back my sobs and my breath caught in my throat. “What’s wrong?” She finally acknowledged the tears.

“H-he’s here, Jen! He was on the train with me!” I sobbed harder.

“Well, yeah. He always comes home.” She trailed off, realizing what I was saying. “Wait! You’re not over him, are you?!”

“No – I mean… I don’t know!” Part of me wanted to get back on the train and redo the last few minutes. I wanted to scream out: “I’m sorry! I still love you!” Yet, another part of me knew that we had ended at the right time. Why prolong the inevitable? We couldn’t last; not with our careers taking us two hours in opposite directions. I knew that at our freshman Christmas; I knew it when I got the letter. Both parts of me were undecided on which one was the right one.

Jenna finally untangled my crying body from her hug and ushered me to the car. “If you still loved him, why’d you do it? Why did you hurt him like that? I mean, I know you got the job opportunity and you thought that would pull you apart, but James would’ve gone to the ends of the earth to make you happy. You couldn’t have honestly thought that that was the turning point of your relationship! You guys loved each other!” She ranted, panting with the anger that had been building up inside. Jenna always liked Jamie, sometimes a little more than I felt comfortable with. She was the one to whom I could tell everything about our relationship, and I trusted her to keep all of the details hidden. She was only ten when I had started going out with Jamie, but I told her everything about my first kiss and holding hands with him – the way his thumb rubbed circles on my skin, giving me goosebumps. I confessed to her that first night that I was falling in love with him, and, in a way, so was she. She thirsted for the way Jamie held on to me and kissed me, and they developed a friendship that made my whole family adore Jamie Noble even more than they originally had.

“I didn’t want to lose him,” I sobbed, wiping away the pool of eye makeup that was starting paint my cheeks.

“Of course not. Instead you decided to give him up.” I could sense the anger that I had given up something so good. My face was almost numb from the frozen tears on my face. “God, do you know how broken up he was about you?! The first thing he did when he came home again that summer was come over to search for you. I wanted to tell him, but Mom said to keep out of it because it didn’t affect me… We aren’t all so lucky to find our soulmate in high school. How could you just throw it all away like that?!”

“Because I knew we were going to break up anyways! I knew it!” I thought back to our last Christmas together…

~~~

Jamie and I had been sitting on the couch, holding hands, kissing. My parents were in the kitchen, cooking dinner for Christmas Eve. The rest of the Noble family would be coming over for dinner soon, as was tradition since my freshman year of high school. We had been kissing for two minutes when his cellphone started ringing from on the coffee table behind my back. He jumped away from me surprised, but kissed me hard again. I could tell that he wasn’t into the kiss; that he was fiddling with his phone behind my back. He never stopped kissing me to play with his phone…
“I-I really have to take this, babe…” He said and pushed me off of his lap, hurrying onto the porch out the back door and answering the phone.
I couldn’t help it… He’d never done this before, so I turned into the overly-suspicious, conniving girlfriend, and silently opened the snow-frosted window.

“Hey. I told you not to call me today! I’m with her!” He spoke quickly, as if worried about me catching him. The person on the other end of the line seemed to respond before he spoke again. “I know! But I’m not sure. Maybe I’m rushing things. Maybe I should wait to tell her… What if it doesn’t work out?”
That was all I needed to hear. I put the window back down. It was inevitable that he was going to find a replacement for me – erm, more of an upgrade, really. We had gone our separate ways; I couldn’t blame him for looking for someone who could satisfy his needs while we were hours apart…

~~~

“You don’t honestly think that he would cheat on you, do you?!” Jenna asked skeptically, after the words had coming rushing out like the waterfall of tears down my cheeks. The snow on the ground outside reminded me of that Christmas Eve. Maybe that was why I had been so eager to never come back…

“I didn’t want to! Part of me still believes that he wouldn't - he couldn't! But you should’ve seen him. He looked so anxious and nervous, and then he was smiling into the phone! I wanted to be that other girl who could make him smile like that!”

“Wake up and smell the cold hard truth, Kenah: you were! Damn it, you still are!” She yelled at me as we pulled into the driveway. I almost regretted coming back; there were so many places about this house that reminded me of him. So many happy memories… They harvested so much pain…