Meeting again and then…

Claes Jonasson
16 min readJun 18, 2020
man and woman in their late 40s close together, looking at each other

The long distance train sped through miles of suburbs towards downtown. Fields and occasional woods that accompanied the railroad earlier on had given way to streets and houses, interspersed with trees, spreading out as far as he could see. The train rushed along, elevated on an embankment, now and then crossing a street on a thundering steel bridge. Down there people were coming and going, doing life like any other day.

For Michael, this was not any other day. To be sure, he was regularly on trains or planes, traveling for work. Because there was always another consulting job in another town.

He was headed to one of those assignments. In another city, tomorrow. But today, he’d stop here, in this city.

As the train got closer to the main train station, he felt oddly excited. He’d boarded early this morning, barely awake, having skipped breakfast to make it to the station on time.

Now, after few naps and brunch in the dining car, he was looking forward to being back in this metropolis where he once lived. Plus, when he stepped off the train there, he’d meet Jody. They hadn’t seen each other in ages. And the last time had gone spectacularly badly.

After that disaster, he never thought he’d see her face to face again. Parting was the culmination of a slow burn of growing apart. Like two trains heading down the same track. One after the other. Then at some point a switch is thrown and one train goes on a track veering to the left and the other veers to the right. Never to be on the same track again. Seemingly without losing any momentum.

If they had just slowed down back then.

There had been a day when it was abundantly clear to him that for all the things they had in common and that used to draw them together, there were other things, maybe bigger, that pushed them apart. What he wanted out of life wasn’t what she wanted. And vice versa. Their once converging paths would not converge again. And so the moment was gone.

Going their separate ways had been painful. He moved away. Given his on-the-road career, that had been easy enough. But still painful. Though through it all, he wished her well. No animosity.

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Claes Jonasson

Writer, creative and web designer. Novelist in progress. Perpetually curious about life and living.