Connection Lost
The network signal abruptly dropped off the cliff into nowhere, leaving her to stare at the smartphone blankly. The video’s buffering symbol running in perpetual circles around and around the centre of the screen, desperately trying to reconnect for her and pave the way home to ignorance and bliss.
That was when the girl felt it creep back in. Despair. She sat in the window seat of the train carriage in a daze staring out at the lake and beyond, as the train stood defiantly still on the track in the Caledonian countryside, waiting for the rail track ahead to be clear of incoming traffic and eventually safe to traverse.
The girl frustratingly flicked the Wi-Fi signal on and off multiple times, switching to mobile data in a desperate struggle to maintain her distraction. A futile effort. In a panic, she rummaged through different apps, attempting to play music, flick through photos and even reply back to some old messages.
It was too late.
Thoughts creeped out of the shadows crawling into the forefront of her mind. At first, they fleeted gradually like a faint breeze, then festered, shrieked and howled and before she knew it - a tempest of anxiety and grief overwhelmed the girl. The thoughts urged her to remember, teasing and gnawing at her brain till all that remained was a singular thought: the reason why she was travelling so far from home to the English capital. They were defiantly victorious, haunting her, weaving a tale in her mind that she desperately resisted.
Yet, they persisted.
She finally gave in. A tear burst out, dripping down the mound of her lower eyelid. Though no sounds followed along with the stream. Another. And another streaked down. Still, she remained resistant and proud. Unrelenting in the face of sorrow, concealing her trembling face towards the glass pane. In truth, she did not want to disclose her sadness openly so an unsuspecting stranger would catch a glimpse of it. How could she answer the question, ‘Are you okay?’ with honesty. To have an awkward conversation that evoked only pity and heeded unwarranted advice like, ‘Be strong’, ‘At least she lived a long life’, ‘There is a reason for everything’. Or the most harmful one: ‘I know how you feel’.
There was no need to confront these lines now. She needed to reserve her strength for later.
The girl's mind trotted outside of her head and she remembered what awaited her at the end of the line. A visit to her mother, a final farewell at the place where her body will lay till the end of all days.
The girl sat there numbly on the train carriage in the middle of the countryside, hiding the grief in plain sight. While other passengers chatted amicably among themselves, laughing and gossiping. Some of them simply scrolling silently on their phones with the headphones plugged in, disconnected from the world and patiently waiting for the monotonous journey to continue.
But not her.
She dreaded the moment when her trip would ultimately run its course. The moment when she would have to step off onto the platform, greeted by an inevitable tragic end.
To date, this is the shortest story I’ve written: standing at 528 words. It began as a simple writing exercise to practise compression and word economy.
It was inspired by a real-life experience of mine. In 2014, my grandfather passed away while I was travelling down from St Andrews to London. I hoped to see him one last time in the hospital before he died. Unfortunately, fate had other plans.
In retrospect, the event reminds me to always be kind and compassionate to others. We never know what invisible battles lie underneath the surface of any stranger - much like the girl, I concealed my grief on that train, desperate for any little distraction on that seven-hour trip to an irreversible conclusion.
I intentionally wrote a vague description of “the girl” with the purpose that the reader could place themselves in the story; you can substitute the inevitable fate of the mother with that of any grandparent, parent, partner/spouse, son, daughter, sister, brother, friend… you get the idea, and it becomes a universal story of grief that everyone is familiar with.
Many of us have been in the shoes of “that person”. Perhaps, every once in awhile, we need a reminder to be more compassionate to those around us, because they may need it more than we will ever realise.