Last night, at the train station between sleep and not-sleep, I had an encounter with a strange woman.
She was dressed in a black and white polka-dot dress, dark stockings with a black kitten heeled shoes, and her head was that of a baby blue styrofoam egg carton. When I approached her to ask about it she held her hand up and said she would answer any questions I wanted to ask if first she talked with me about her wife instead. I agreed. I did not catch her name.
This is what she told me.
"Every morning," she said, "I wake up next to my beautiful wife in our queen sized bed and ask her what she'd like to this morning. Some days, though rarely, she'll ask for the bowl of the cereal we have in our cabinet and some days she'll wake up a bit late and tell me that she'll pick up something from the deli by her office. But most days she asks me to make her something from the eggs I have in my head."
She opened her mouth pointed at the six pearly white things nested in her cranium. Then she closed it and continued talking to me.
"I often do have some to make for her when she asks. I then get up and make me and her breakfast while she gets herself ready for work in the morning. She is not a morning person and often gets anxious when she eats, you see, so I take great pleasure in cooking food for her when she is otherwise indisposed with her unpleasant early routine. I find it so enjoyable, in fact, that I often feel afterwards as though I hadn't had to pluck these things from my head in the first place."
I heard in the distance a train coming in, a sleeper train, the train I was supposed to depart on. I got the feeling, at the time, that hearing it sped up her telling of the story. I remember thinking that it must've been her train too.
"Back when we first met it took a while for her to understand me and the situation I had to deal with. That I had to take the eggs out of me and that it hurt a little bit to do it and that if I left them too long they would rot and take a while to clean out of my head."
The train got closer.
"It took us even longer for her to know that If I don't have any eggs I feel sad and annoyed and depressed. Many of my past relationships with people have ended because of either them taking too many or not enough eggs of mine. But with her, it seemed, she was willing to help me manage my egg count. Overtime she seemed to know exactly when I was itching to get rid of some and when I wanted to hold some of them so close. And when she needed to help me get rid of ones I had grown too attached to as well."
The train is just around the bend.
"I don't know if she knows this but whenever she asks for eggs I now no longer feel scared to part with them. Because the look on her face when she and I enjoy them together around our table makes it a pleasure to."
The train broke quietly next to us as though it was holding pause for her story. She looked away from me and at one of the opening train car doors. Out wandered a woman in a night cap and a set of striped pajamas, clearly still a bit intoxicated from being in the sleeper train. She dragged her feet over to and slumped her arms in a hug around the polka-dotted woman who, in turn, hugged her back, though much more briskly. The polka-dotted woman turned her head to me and mimed a shushing motion over her clasped lips. She was smiling.
She turned and walked her slothful companion over towards the exit of the train station and, eventually, out of sight.
I stood there looking at the train that was supposed to take me away, decided to blearily make a note of the woman I had met, and then did my usual difficult walk over the threshold and into the sleeper cabin.