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It took Mark two days of careful searching before he thought he spotted her again. The train home was particularly crowded and he had managed to get an aisle seat, where he was constantly being knocked on the shoulder by a large heavy backpack hanging from the shoulder of a school boy who should have been home hours ago. The 7pm Friday night train was no place for school kids with their bulky school bags to still be heading home from school. Mark guessed that he must have been hanging out in the city with his mates for a while and was only now heading home to his family.
Further down the train Mark noticed a hand holding on to the back of a seat. The fingers of her hand had long painted fingernails with a deep red colour and each nail had been embellished with a tiny sparkling crystal that twinkled at him mesmerisingly. The style of the nail varnish reminded him of Her. The train jostled the passengers as it twisted and turned to cross over the jumble of interchanging points and turn to cross over to the south side of the large river that divided the city in half. He couldn't see the woman who's hand flashed its' presence at him, to see if it was her or not. The train pulled in to the next station and a few people disembarked, but even more passengers climbed aboard and forced a small amount of space for themself, causing everyone else to move and limit the space that they had briefly occupied; stepping on toes and nudging brief cases and shopping bags into other peoples ribs. It was still a little early for the drunken husbands to be getting on the train and carrying the tired and wilted apology flowers home to the missus.
After two more stations the train began to breath again as fewer people tried to board the train and more began to disembark as they headed further away from the central city area and out in to the suburbs.
Mark looked up from his ipad and managed to see the back of the woman with the red sparkling nails and realised that the shape of the woman was all wrong, she had short, spiked, bleached white hair with black roots and bright pink tips. This was definitely not the young woman who had sat beside him only two days before.
He sighed as he realised he had been holding his breath in anticipation. “Damn,” he thought, “now I have to wait until Monday...or, I could drive around Morningside all weekend in the the hope of finding her....No, that would be just too stupid. She probably doesn't even live there, she could drive miles to the train. She probably doesn't even work in the city. It was probably just a one off trip in to the city...Besides, I promised Dad I'd help him to clean out the garage...and to mow the lawn.” He sighed again as he resigned himself to never seeing the pretty young woman again.
The Commute Page 2