Lovers Lie

An early twilight, thanks to the obscured skies that crept up some time past Reading. This woke me a little - the first train from Worcester down to Reading had kept pushing me to a dangerous sleep. Lull of the wheels, and that abyss of dreamy deeps below me... I'm not sure where this exhaustion came from - I slept well last night - and anyway, I had the same issue on the journey up on Saturday. As the train trundled through the bright sun and the lucid afternoon landscape, I was afraid that if I gave up to sleep, I might not awake until Slough, or Paddington, and for the latter, there were no circle or district line tubes to catch...
I managed to get a coffee at Reading station from a stall on the platform. I wasn't sure, but the girl who served me looked like the girl who served me coffee when I was here in May 2010, then travelling up to Worcester. This unnerved me slightly, though there is nothing unusual in the same person working in the same place over a number of years.
These days seem full of superstitions I can't quite place.
It was a busy train from Reading to Gatwick, but I was quite happy, serene in the early stretched out twilight, watching all the obscure and secret places no-one ever thinks about pass by, all those shadowy estates with their hidden gardens, spines of trees across the ridge of a slight hill, parks abandoned in the rain. I felt content, settled in this twilight phase, this transition. The man opposite me commented to his wife how 'murky' the day was out there.

(there is always that fear of life passing you by, when I was younger it was there, this fear of getting old before I had fully finished with being young, even when I was fifteen, the approaching end of childhood unnerved me, and I remember the autumn of when I was twenty one - 1993 - the dread of the passing autumn days that I wanted to last for far, far longer, and in this all, there is that fear also of staying still, of watching other people - other places - move on, and being left behind - Mark and myself, during the days of Actors Orphanage, even wrote a song about it, 'Lovers Lie'. It was called 'Train Song' for a while because we had used a train sound effect during the song, and the lyrics were full of references to trains and journeys, and watching the trains pass by but never being on the train... I don't have the song any longer - I only had a cassette copy and we recorded the song over the balmy Easter of 1996 - sixteen years ago - but the fear of being left behind still remains even if the song is long gone)

They are secret landscapes you see by train, as unreal and unreachable as the cloud kingdoms seen by plane.
Windows of houses promising rooms dulled by dim afternoon light, a slight valley, scattered houses hidden by suburban trees and the street lamps having just come on, and, there - for a time - I thought the train might creep through the ground of the mansion I have seen only once before, February of 1997, and can't remember where - Reigate? Redhill, the place anyway where I saw what I came to call the King of Stations. The train stations of these places are secret things - empty platforms lit by white lamps, and no-one gets off the train, and I think what would it be like to fall in love here, to sleep here, to dream and wake and get lost here? Oh, but we're all lost here already though, as we pass by in these trains, through these unknown places at twilight, and we don't stop and we don't stay, and we're still all scared of being left behind.