TCP 21 - Meidaimae

The train comes to a stop, gently, precisely, the windows this train, headed into the city, and the windows of another train, escaping the city, meet, for a brief moment, creating various designs of visual passage; a cold wall of shining and bolt-ridden steel, a platform carrying the sleepy footsteps filtered through a conversation of businessmen.

Here the windows align leaving merely a sliver of passage, revealing a young woman, beautiful in her simplicity, framed perfectly as if a portrait of Renoir or Rembrandt, and nothing more. She is animated, cheerful and lively in a conversation she perhaps shares with a friend, perhaps her mother, perhaps a lover, perhaps a stranger. She smiles, laughs, nods affectionately, parts her hair away from her eyes, and the trains, headed in and out of the city, resume their respective courses, their engines creating a gradual synchronized crescendo, the sliver slowly closing off.