Kadin

Kadin sat in the darkened kitchen, listening to the gentle call of the train, the mournful sound trailing off in the distance. She could feel the tremors shaking the earth beneath her, snaking their way from the rusted old metal of the train tracks, outside the town borders, to the hardwood floor beneath her bare feet.

She often sat up at night, listening to the soft sounds of the darkness, while her husband slept peacefully in another room. Tonight, the crackle of the woodstove kept her company while she sat with an old novel in a well worn chair next to the fireplace. She enjoyed listening for the train in the distance, took comfort in its regular patrol of the perimeter, protecting the town like an old sentry.

Tonight, she found herself escaping in a half-full glass of smoky red wince. As her gaze settled on the dark pool of liquid in her hand, memories danced before her eyes on the blood-red stage.
She remembered the last night she had awoken in a cold sweat, terrified of the darkness looming before her. She heard the soft whistle of the train, only this time the soft whistle turned into a sharpening shriek as the ground rumbled beneath her bed. She felt the slight tremors grow into a steady rumbling until she startled herself into an upright position, gazing desperately into the darkness before her. Within seconds, the black landscape lit up with the blinding glow of an oncoming freight train. What seemed like only an instant after she saw the behemoth smash through her bedroom wall, the night once again fell dark and silent.

She could not remember if it was a dream. She assumed so. The train tracks ran around the perimeter of the town, not through it. Her house had no damage to it, no one else awoke at the sights and sounds of imminent destruction. It must have been a dream.

The memory faded away again into her glass of wine, creeping back into the world of fantasy from whence it had come. As she floated back into the present moment, she heard the soft scrape of slippered feet against the floor, slowly approaching her darkened sanctuary.

“Good morning.” She looked at the clock, glowing silently on the kitchen counter across the room. The numbers 3:42 stood out against the dark backdrop.

“I guess it is.” She watched her husband walk over to the fridge, pull out the jug of purple juice, and pour himself a glass. “What are you doing up?”

Brennan shrugged without turning around. “Something woke me. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I figured I’d come in here for a drink.”
He turned around and watched her silently for a moment, before continuing in a sleepy speech. “What are you doing up?”

She mimicked his shrug. “I couldn’t sleep.” She swirled the wine glass in her hand. “I guess I had the same idea as you.”

He padded over to her corner of the room, taking a seat in the identical chair sitting across from hers. His gaze slowly wandered to the flames flickering in the open woodstove. He didn’t know what to say to her. They had spent decades growing closer together and yet at the same time growing further apart. In the daytime they got along amicably, wandering through the day’s routine, each glad to have the other close by. At nighttime, when the sun began to set and the daylight slowly turned to indigo twilight and then near-complete darkness, she found herself lost in the world of the shadows – in memories that refused to leave her at peace, with darkened questions lurking around every corner. He did not follow her into this world. Frightened, he stayed on the shoreline while she waded into the mystery that lay hidden in the dusk.

Their bedroom reflected this difference: her bookshelves were lined with poetry, classic novels, the great philosophers, and the worlds’ religions; his were lined with media-related magazines, books about cars, and a smattering of novels he had collected over the years. On the surface, it seemed to present no problem – they simply had different interests, read different books, watched different movies. Deep below the surface, though, she felt the chasm that separated them. It was not just with him, but with most people she had met who preferred to flounder on the surface of an ocean so dark and deep. The questions of the great philosophers were dead. God was dead, a lingering remnant of Nietzsche and existentialism. The great questions were now whether or not to buy the latest shiny object, whether to have pizza or salad for supper, whether or not one was considered accepted into the dominant group of the week.

She stared into her wine glass and reflected on the loneliness of a philosophical existence.
“What do you think this means?” She posed the question rather abruptly, with no lead in and no reference to what she might be talking about.
“What does what mean?”

“Anything. Life, love, us sitting here in the darkness as the rest of the world approaches four a.m.”

“It means that I can’t sleep. That I have to get up again in three hours and go to work.”
She didn’t even watch him as he responded. She continued to stare into the cool red liquid in her wine glass, almost hoping an answer would show itself there.

“Why do you want to know? You can’t answer these questions. No one can.” She was used to this response by now. Most people gave some variation of this response. Her husband had been trying to get her to believe this for years.

“What would you do if you woke up one day with God?”

“What?” He looked at her, alarmed. He almost believed that she was about to get into religion again, leaving him adrift on the shores of spirituality. Over the years, though, he had learned to recognize these questions. They posed no threat to him, nor to her. They were simply questions she played with, sometimes dragging him into foreign, unknowable territory with her inquiries.

“Nothing.” She had gotten used to the responses. She no longer expected him to try to answer. She kept voicing her thoughts, though, to let him know that these questions still ran rampant through her mind, through her entire being. To her, the most exciting part was the not knowing. The constant searching was what drove her, gave purpose to her existence.

She sat back in her chair, gazing into her wine glass again. “Nevermind.”

He didn’t respond; he didn’t know how to respond.

As they sat in the darkness, listening to the crackling flames, she felt her whole world start to melt and escape through her finger tips. She didn’t know if he felt the atmosphere, the tangible fabric of space dripping away, creating a gap between them. As the time slowly slipped away, following Kadin into the shadows, the sun began to rise over the distant horizon. The train was long gone. The only sounds aside from the crackling of the fire came from the songbirds starting to stir outside their kitchen window. As daylight dripped in through the windows, Brennan slowly shuffled back to bed; Kadin continued to sit in the chair beside the fire place and fell asleep beneath the encroaching sunlight.




Brennan woke up to the blazing sunlight of late morning filtering through the curtained bedroom window. He rolled over and ran his hand across the empty half of the bed that Kadin usually occupied. The sheets were cold; she probably hadn’t been back to bed after she had gotten up to sit near the fireplace in the kitchen. As he rolled groggily out of bed, he slipped his feet into the worn slippers waiting at the bedside and headed into the kitchen.

Light shimmered in from the many windows surrounding the open space of the kitchen-dining room. The surfaces all gleamed in the late morning light, the emptiness reflected in the cool, clean, barren surfaces. Brennan shuffled slowly over to the large, cushioned chairs sitting next to the fireplace, expecting to find Kadin either still asleep or quietly sitting in one of them.

The chairs were empty. The kitchen was empty. No sounds echoed down the hallway; there was no suggestion of any other human presence in the house aside from Brennan himself. He walked to the windows, following the small shaft of sunlight, and looked outside to where their small garden lay buried under a foot of snow. He could see no one. Slightly confused, but not yet alarmed, Brennan turned back to the kitchen to fix himself some breakfast.




A few miles away, Kadin stood in the chilly air, staring at the train that stood directly in front of her on the old, wooden platform. She remembered the haunting call in the nighttime, the cry of the train as it raced along the perimeter of the town, traveling to and from foreign lands that as yet only existed in Kadin’s imagination. She had started out towards the train station just as the sun began to rise. She followed the pale orange glow over the horizon to what she hoped would be her salvation. Now, she stood in the open air, wondering exactly where it was she was going or what it was that she would find.

“Last call for Smooth Rock Falls, Fauquier, Kapuskasing, Val Rita.” A tinny voice echoed through the small train station at Kadin’s back and trickled out onto the small wooden platform. Should she go north? The idea ran through her thoughts. Immersing herself further into the crisp landscape of a deepening winter might help clear her mind. She shivered in the cold, though, and decided to go south. As the train chugged back to life and began to disappear into the distance, Kadin fixed her gaze on the horizon over which an approaching train would appear.

With her thoughts lost in the distant landscape, she was surprised when someone brushed roughly against her.

“Sorry.” A small man whisked past her, tipping his hat in apology.

She decided to follow him into the small train station. As she approached the main counter, a familiar face greeted her. “Kadin. How are you doing? Traveling for the weekend?” The small, round face belonged to a friend of Kadin’s; they had met in college. Lauren looked only slightly surprised to see Kadin at a train station without her husband.

“I’ve been good,” Kadin lied. “How have you been?”

“Oh, the same. So, where are you headed?”
Kadin cast her gaze casually towards the polished surface of the counter before answering. “Could I get a ticket for the next train south?”

“The next train south?” The surprised registered in Lauren’s voice. “That’s…” she took a moment to look it up on her computer screen. “Brussels.”

“Brussels?” Kadin was obviously surprised.

“Yeah. In southern Ontario. It’s a small town to the east of Lake Huron.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“That’s where you want to go?”

Kadin nodded.

Lauren looked back at the screen, obviously confused. In a few moments, Kadin had her ticket.

“Can I ask you something?” Now Lauren looked concerned.

Again, Kadin only nodded.

“Are you and Brennan ok?”

Lauren had known Kadin for years. The two had been close friends in college and had continued to talk regularly, going out for lunch or to the movies on a regular basis. Lauren was pretty familiar with Kadin’s life.

“Umm…yeah.” Again, Kadin avoided her friend’s eyes. “I just need to get away for a while.” She watched the confusion play out in the faint lines on Lauren’s face. “Don’t worry. I’m coming back.” With that, Kadin smiled brightly at her friend and turned back towards the train platform.

As she stood waiting for the arrival of the lumbering train, Kadin lost herself in memories again.

She was back in the kitchen in the darkness of her home, bathed in the silvery glow of moonlight. The fireplace crackled softly, keeping her company as she sat in the worn armchair with a smoky glass of wine. She had turned this into ritual: she would wake each night around two or three a.m. and wander into the kitchen for a chilled glass of dark red wine. She would then sit in her chair, warmed by the fireplace, and run through the day’s events, her life so far, and all the experiences that had gone as yet unlived. Memories from adolescence often came back to her – the time when she still looked like a beauty queen, when she had no commitment to keep, when her friends and she could carelessly create their own world, regardless of other people’s needs and opinions. She remembered her best friend, their loud and boisterous lunch times and evenings spent basking in the freedom of adolescence.

On most of these nights, Kadin turned on the small stereo that sat beside the fireplace, playing the music softly, so as not to wake her sleeping husband just down the darkened hallway. One particular night came back to her: An old Lenny Kravitz song filled the room with a soft, smooth rhythm. The lyrics evoked a bittersweet melancholy that filled Kadin with the sweet sensation of reliving memories she had never experienced in the first place.

I want to see the stars, the Milky Way, and even Mars.

Kadin had seen the starlit sky from the darkened country only once. She had lived in the suburbs for most of her life, leaving her sprawling home only to go to the city. Her whole world had been basked in just enough light at nighttime to block out the full beauty of the stars. She longed for moonlight walks along the countryside, picnics beneath the chilly near-winter sky, nights spent beneath the stars. When she closed her eyes, she remembered the fabulous nights she had spent in her dreams, dancing until dawn in a sweaty underground club, watching the sun rise over the horizon on a warm summer’s morning, feeling the cold bite of the winter air on small patches of exposed skin – all with someone other than her husband.

In the darkness of such remembered nights, Kadin had come to realize the obstacle that stood in the way of her longed for happiness: her young self had refused to die, refuse to grow old with the body that insisting on aging. The faint lines forming around her eyes marked her years only. At heart, she longed to dance through the hours of the night, to fill the house with a deep, liquid rhythm that would transform her world into the edges of heaven. She longed for freedom, for moments of joyous carelessness, for the thrill of the chase and the satisfaction of returned romance. She longed for someone share the world with, someone to sit with as they watched the crowds go by in a small coffee shop or watched the sun rise in the crispness of early morning, someone who could keep her entranced as he spoke or could sit silently beside her enveloped in a beautiful world that belonged only to them.
She often imagined herself in a small coffee shop, quietly drawing pictures in a pile of sugar spilled carelessly on the table between herself and….someone else. In her dreams, this scene reoccurred each time she met this man. In reality, she would meet him occasionally: the man that she thought could fill her life with laughter, romance, and excitement. He would be a friend of a friend, a co-worker, a stranger sipping a steaming cup of coffee only a few tables down from where she sat, alone, twirling a slender finger in a small pile of sugar on her table. As she walked along the darkened streets at twilight, sat in a coffee shop, alone, mulling over experiences – real and imagined – she constantly searched for one thing: connection.

“Nice day out.” The voice approached her from behind, the owner standing directly behind Kadin and out of her line of sight.

“The sunrise was beautiful, but it’s really cold out here.” Kadin could see her words leave her lips on puffs of smoke, condensation from her warm mouth escaping into the frigid air.

“Where are you headed?” The voice moved from behind Kadin to her side. A man stood calmly beside her, apparently unaffected by the cold. He looked down at her slightly; he was about four inches taller than she. His green eyes sparkled in the growing light of day, reflecting a hidden knowledge in their depth.

“Wherever the next train south is going.”

The man raised his eyebrows in a slightly shocked response. “The next train south?”

Kadin nodded, keeping her eyes fixed on the stranger’s face.

“Is there any particular reason for this?” She could sense that he was intrigued. She had not given him an answer that he had expected.

“I want to get out of here. I need to get away.” She cast a long, sorrowful glance back in the direction of her home. “I just need some time away.”

“Is it a man?”

Kadin focused her gaze, trying to interpret the knowledge in his eyes. “Yes….no. I…don’t know.” She stopped, then, and looked quickly at the ground, before he could interpret the emotions that she was sure showed swimming in her hazel eyes. “I’m…not comfortable at home. Around him. Anywhere, actually. I’m bored. I’m lonely.”

“And so you’re leaving?”

She nodded, turning her gaze up towards his face again.

In the distance, the train whistled deeply. Kadin felt the slight trembling of the wooden boards on the platform beneath her feet. Within seconds, the train would be approaching, ready to take her away, allow her to explore.

“Would all passengers destined for Brussels, Dublin, Stratford, and on southward please board the train now. Have you’re tickets ready. Brussels, Dublin, Stratford, and on southward.” The tinny voice echoed again out through the small train station and out onto the cold platform.

“Is that you?” The stranger was still standing beside her, hands in the pockets of his long, black overcoat; she could not tell if he had a ticket for this particular train or not.

Kadin nodded.

“My name’s William, by the way. You can call me Liam. Everyone does.” He extended a gloved hand towards her.

He took his hand in hers. “I’m Kadin.”

“Well, I guess I’ll be accompanying you southward, Kadin. I’m headed to Brussels, myself. Just getting away for the weekend.”

Kadin smiled shyly, casting her haunted eyes towards the ground as she turned and headed toward the waiting train.


Kadin’s shoes clicked softly as she walked slowly down the centre isle, towards the middle of the long row of worn, burgundy seats. She settled into a seat, identical to the rest and smelling faintly of lavender perfume, and watched as Liam trailed slightly behind her, settling into a seat across from her.
She took this moment to survey him more closely. His features were striking: his eyes shimmered, the colour of jade; his dark hair, cut short, seemed to spike up in various directions of its own accord; his face seemed almost ethereal in its ivory texture.

Lost in thought, Kadin was pulled back to reality by Liam’s curious smile. One again, his eyes gleamed almost as though he knew something, exciting and important, that she did not.

“I…” she stopped, unsure of what she was about to say. “Have you taken this train ride before? To Brussels, I mean?”

“No, I haven’t.” Liam turned his gaze to the window, watching as the platform began to fade into the distance and the train chugged away through the broken forest. “I haven’t been on a train in quite some time, actually. This will be the first time in…years.”

Kadin smiled again, unsure of what else to say. The feeling of abandonment, isolation, struck her again. She reached into the small handbag she had brought with her and pulled out a tattered novel. “Do you read much?”

He turned his head to examine the book that she held sideways in her lap. “Philosophy?”
She smiled, obviously pleased that he had recognized that Seneca was a philosopher.

“Philosophy’s dangerous, you know.” He said it as a simple statement, the words sounding only slightly more ominous that Kadin would have expected.

“I know.” Kadin cast her haze back down into her lap. She visually traced the edges of the aging book.

“So, what are you looking for?”

“What?” This question forced her to look up at him, again, searching for the real question and its answer in his yes.

“Philosophers are always looking for something, are they not?” Kadin bobbed her head downwards, a half-nod. “So, what about you?”

She remained silent for a moment, afraid of what she might reveal to this stranger, wondering what she could tell him without driving him to judge her as strange, delirious, unstrung.

“Connection.” As she spoke the word, she continued to hold his gaze. She longed for a single moment of connection, for a string of moments and experiences to prove to her how deeply she could experience an event. She longed to bask in the glow of a shimmering look held for an instant turned to an eternity, melting the world around until all that mattered was the single instant in which she felt absolutely connected – to someone else, to her surroundings, connected. She longed for the touch of a hand that set her skin to a slow burn, for someone to sit silently with in the cool crispness of autumn not out of a lack of things to say but out of a transcendent moment of understanding. She longed for the day when she could share an experience without frustration, misrepresentation, and long explanations.

“Connection?” He sounded surprised, almost concerned.

Again, Kadin bobbed her head in a half-nod, keeping her eyes on his.

“Would you like to accompany me this trip?” It was an abrupt change. She wasn’t sure how this fit into their conversation. “To Brussels? We’ll go…out.” He reached for her hand, lightly touched her fingers.

Kadin struggled to swallow the lump forming in her throat. “Sure.” Her heart leaped at his fingers lightly touched hers. She felt the world around them melt, wondered if this was perhaps what she had been looking for.




The late morning sun shone down on the thin blanket of snow, creating a crystalline hologram out of the landscape. As the train pulled up to the next station, Kadin thought about Brennan, probably just getting up at this time back home. She had left a short note for him, attached it beneath a magnet on the fridge.

I’ve got to get away for a while. I’m taking the train. I’ll be back soon.
Kadin

She hadn’t explained herself; she hadn’t told him where she was going; she hadn’t told him why. At least, she thought, the note would prevent him from worrying too much; it would prevent him from calling in the police or forming his own search party.

Upon her reflections, she felt a growing warmth inside her. She thought of her husband with a soft sensation of tenderness, a soft heat that moved up from her toes with his memory. If only…she began the thought, but her ideas trailed off into oblivion.

If only. That was her problem. If only she could dance with him until dawn, experience the thrilling euphoria that she felt upon first falling in love with someone. If only he understood her.

Liam approached her from behind, standing close to her in the cool near-winter air. “Shall we?” He held out his hand for her to take and led her off the platform and towards the heart of the small town.




Liam led Kadin through the snowy streets of Brussels. When they arrived, and for the first half hour Kadin kept thinking about the name of this town and the ones further down the train tracks: Brussels, Dublin, Stratford; all lay in the southern regions of Canada, nearly an eternity away from their namesakes in Europe. It seemed to Kadin that whoever had named these towns had been desperately homesick, trying to bring a piece of European heritage to a new land, possibly hoping to capture the spirit of home by adopting its name. She found it both touching and rather sad, a pathetic attempt to return home without ever leaving the newfound foreign land.

“Are you hungry?” The sound of Liam’s voice snapped Kadin back to the present moment. “There’s a café just up ahead. We could get something to eat.”

“I’d love to.” As they approached the crouching, red-brick building, the smell of freshly baked bread wafted on the air, grounding Kadin, if only for a moment, in the concreteness of the present. The bittersweet aroma of brewing coffee rushed in to fill her senses as Liam held the frost-bitten door open for her.

The interior of the small café struck Kadin as incredibly foreign when compared to the chains of coffee shops back home. A friendly, plump woman stood behind the counter at the front of the café, smiling at Kadin and Liam as though they had just made her day. The small tables were arranged haphazardly around the small room, conducive to intimate conversations or larger gatherings. Best of all, the aroma of baked goods and brewing coffee reminded Kadin of home – the home she had when she was a child, carefree and full of love expressed through homemade cookies and fresh-baked bread.

As Liam approached the counter and ordered coffee and sandwiches for the two of them, Kadin sat down in a far table, nearest to the large window looking out on the cobble-stone sidewalk. Out of habit, she dumped a small pile of sugar onto the shiny round table and started tracing her finger through the grains.

When Liam sat down at the table, he placed Kadin’s meal in front of her silently. She was absorbed in tracing patterns in the sugar – she looked up gratefully for the food placed in front of her – and the snippets of conversation she caught, coming from throughout the small café.

“No. No. It’s fine. No, I agree with you. It’s fine. No, I’m happy. It’s fine. I’ll talk to you more later. Goodbye.” A middle aged woman slammed her small cell phone shut and took a long swig from the pink mug sitting in front of her.

“You’re what?! “ Two young women sitting across the expanse of polished hardwood sat staring at each other. Kadin hadn’t heard anything prior to or after this comment. Apparently, the confession or statement or question posed had elicited a louder-than-expected response; the girls went back to chattering back and forth quietly.

“What should I do?” Another pair of older women sat closer to the table where Kadin sat silently. One woman, a pretty brunette, toyed with what appeared to be a wedding ring on her finger. The second woman grasped her hand and looked at her silently for a moment.

“Do you love him?” The second woman sounded entirely sincere, as affected by the problem as her friend.

“Kadin?” Her thoughts and observations reeled back into her own reality at the sound of Liam’s voice across the table. “Your coffee’s getting cold.”

Kadin smiled. “Thanks.”


After the café, Liam and Kadin wandered around the town aimlessly, listening to snippets of conversation that floated by them on the gentle breeze – many people arguing, discussing anything from laundry schedules to the failings of modern politics, explaining, complaining, and confessing many things that Kadin considered relatively banal. Where’s the beauty? She thought. Where’s the romance? Not a single couple caught her eye; she sensed no romance in the air, no search for truth and beauty, no flashes of inspiration. Where did these moments occur? Had they turned tail and run, taking refuge in the small darkened places where the mind worked overtime, piecing things together that had somehow shattered under the pressure of comprehending life?

At an intersection, Kadin stood silently behind a pair of women roughly her own age, waiting for the glowing ‘don’t walk’ symbol to change to the image of the man signaling pedestrians to cross. They women spoke in harsh, hushed voices, as though they were trying to keep their volume down but having a hard time of it.

“He’s such a jerk.”

“Leave him.” The second woman was certain in her responses.

Kadin cast her gaze down to where the first woman held her hands at waist level, fiddling with what looked like an engagement ring.

“Leave him?” The suggestion seemed to almost frighten her.

The traffic stopped flowing past them and the two women stepped out into the street, out of Kadin’s range of hearing.

Kadin and Liam followed them across the two-lane road and turned right, meandering around the sidewalks with seemingly no particular direction in mind. As they passed another small café, Kadin looked in through the large picture window and noticed a young couple sitting at a small wooden table, stationed directly next to the large window. The young woman watched the man sitting across from her with a look of unabashed adoration; the young man seemed preoccupied and nearly oblivious to the expressions dancing across the girl’s face. As he talked to her, his eyes shifted from her face to the small table between them to the room around, distractedly.

Along their trek, a few individuals caught Kadin off guard. A girl dressed in blood red with hair the colour of the deepest midnight passed Kadin and Liam and looked them both in the eyes; her eyes, the colour of cobalt, flashed madly in the dimming light of approaching twilight; mystery lived in those eyes. A man smiled at Kadin, tipping his fading beige safari hat towards her as he bid her ‘g’day’; Kadin beamed at him, surprised at the random expression of friendliness. In the fleeting instant that she looked him in the eyes she felt a humble moment of understanding – real or imagined, she couldn’t tell. It was small, almost inconsequential, a fleeting acknowledgement of their tempestuous humanity.

Kadin had to wonder, as the man in the beige hat passed further down the snowy sidewalk, where it was that he was walking to. Sometimes she wondered about other people’s lives, abstractedly curious about whether they were happy, what secrets they kept, what drama played out in their daily lives, what gave them purpose and sparked fire in their eyes. Was he going home to a wife and kids? Did he have a lover whom he met in a loft in the urban centre of the city? Did he go home alone and commiserate with his cats, or dogs, about the loneliness of his life? Did he just stumble upon an innovation or invention that would propel him upwards, forwards, give him wings to fly on his euphoric success? Did he work for minimum wage in a dead-end, unsatisfying job? What were his dreams? His fears? And did any of this matter? Did it fit together – peoples’ stories? Or were they merely fragments of a disconnected puzzle that, in the end, had pieces missing and could not be completed?

“So far you’ve seen fragments. A few people struggling to find meaning, stumbling upon moments of illumination, most asleep even to the possibility of such a search. You’ve seen struggles, doubts, conflicts. You’ve seen only half of the magnificence of the human experience.” Liam paused for a moment, his pale green eyes burning like a cool inferno. “Do you want to see the rest?”

“The rest?”

He took the question as an affirmation and veered off their previous course into a small bar, lit only by a dim blue-ish glow coming from the interior. Outside, the stars twinkled their farewell as Kadin descended into the collection of small rooms.

Almost instantly, the heat produced by the scores of bodies and the glow of the blue lamps scattered across the ceiling melted the near-winter chill from her body. As they descended into the collection of small rooms, Kadin noticed nothing spectacular about the scene: bar stools lined the counter that stretched across the largest room, overstuffed couches and tall tables with metal-and-red-vinyl stools filled the otherwise nearly empty space. In the very front of the room, just beneath the one small window that looked out into the night sky, a group of young-ish men seared the atmosphere with soulful sounds – three of them: two with guitars and one barely visible behind a rather large set of drums. A few people sat scattered throughout, talking loudly to each other over the music or simply sitting silently, letting the waves of rhythm roll over them.

Liam led Kadin to a set of overstuffed red vinyl chairs near the far wall. He took her hand as they wove through the obstacle-like set up of other furniture; she could feel the assurance in his grip, a sharp contrast to the preoccupied, lost feeling that had begun to creep into her moods lately.

“Just sit. And listen.”

Kadin relaxed and allowed the music to float lazily over her, around her. The three young men at the front of the room were mainly a cover band; Kadin recognized most of the lyrics that filled the room, crashed into the midnight blue concrete walls before falling slowly to the floor. The beat pulsed through her, rushing through her bloodstream and receding like a far off storm. The waves of rhythm rolled liquidly through her, around her, off the smooth surfaces of her skin.
As Kadin began to melt languidly into the euphoric feeling that filled the darkened room, she felt the connection she had been seeking. The music pulsated with life, a life not separate from her own. She felt at once very separate from and yet unified with the other unrecognizable faces in the small room. The three young men at the front of the room became instruments for something greater, vehicles for a liquid feeling of elation that pulsed through Kadin with each beat of the music.
It was only certain types of music, too. Kadin had felt this floating feeling at home, in the dead of night, with good music blasting through her earphones. It struck a chord inside her, reverberated as though it was an extension of herself, pulsing with the rush of her blood, falling into step with the beat of her heart.
As the evening drew to a close, the music began to fade into the dark blue background of the small room. Kadin felt the edges of reality slowly creeping in, cooling her warm skin as it flickered close to her.

Outside, the stars still waited for her, twinkling like tiny flecks of diamonds embedded in a velvet background.

“"In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side — there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return.1” Liam whispered the words softly as they fell back into step beside each other on the smooth brick sidewalk.

“That, my dear, was a moment of connection.” Liam smiled in a rather mysterious way, looking out into the darkened horizon as though it held the answer to a question Kadin had never asked.
The chunky heels on Kadin’s shoes clunked softly along the sidewalk, creating a soft rhythm that followed her into a memory. She was descending a set of stairs, leading into a darkened underground bar like the one she and Liam had just left. The music flowed fluidly over her, the coloured spotlights suspended from the ceiling, pulsing powerfully to the drumbeat. Within minutes, she became absorbed into a world of cool dark liquor, loud pulsing rhythm, and a flood of endorphins. The experience lifted her to the dizzying heights of euphoria, dashing any inhibitions she may have held to shatters on the ground. Enveloped in a warm feeling of near-weightlessness, she relished every look, every touch, fell into the skin of anyone who had met her eyes that night. At the end, as the music faded away, a part of her wished she could stay wrapped in that experience forever; another part of her feared eventual madness if she did not pull herself back to reality.

The soft beat of her footsteps slowly brought her back to the present moment. She walked beside Liam silently for a time, savoring the cool bite of the near-winter air on the smooth patch of exposed skin between her light purple cloche hat and her thin cotton scarf. She watched the stars shimmer just above the horizon, feeling a growing sense of content with each step she took toward them. As a light breeze whisked past her woolen-covered ears, she felt a deep sense of connectedness with the wind’s wayward, wandering spirit.

The two of them walked out towards the edge of the small urban centre and sat on a small hill overlooking an expanse of wilderness. They had watched the sun slowly sink below the horizon, the orange glow lighting the far-off patch of forest of aflame. That had been hours ago, when the sun sank into darkness and gave the shimmering stars free reign of the night.

As Kadin sat in the thin layer of snow, she felt a numbness creeping its way from her backside into the rest of her body. The calm feeling of unity that she felt, the unusual, fleeting connection with the foreign countryside, ebbed and advanced with the waves of cool winter air filling her with a strange crispness.

“The human existence is, essentially, a lonely one.” She spoke the words softly, unsure of whether she was speaking to herself or to Liam. “We may find stolen moments of intimacy, understanding, and connection, but once the moment is gone, the experience is forever lost in a sea of memories that may or may not have ever happened at all.”

“Does that bother you?” Liam was, again, looking out to the horizon with the same expression of mystery and calming wisdom on his face.

“No.” The answer surprised Kadin. It wasn’t a conclusion she would have expected herself to come to. “It’s fine. Even the moments of continuity and connection that you feel are fragmented, they can exist in that sea of memories. I don’t think it matters if they ever really happened as you remember them or not.”

Liam looked at her then, possibly expecting an elaboration.

“It’s like the meaning of life. It doesn’t matter if we figure it all out or not. Either way, the experience exists. If the most magnificent experience only happens in a fleeting instant and then is gone, only to live in the land of memory, then is that memory not all the better for having the fleeting moment of connection, of ecstasy? If that moment disappears into half-forgotten memories, is the elaboration, the falsely remembered version any better or worse than the original?”

Contemplating the greatest moments that she had experienced, as well as those that had only existed in the world of dreams, Kadin drifted off into a state of semi-consciousness, feeling herself twinkle with the diamond stars.





The next morning, the sun shone in through a small window in Kadin’s small room in a small hotel in the urban centre of the small town. She slowly shuffled her way downstairs for breakfast where she met Liam, already sitting in a rather large chair reading the newspaper.

The train ride home was spent mostly in amicable silence, punctuated with some conversation about each person’s past. Liam, like Kadin, was a wanderer. He traveled around the country, seeking nothing except to be found by whatever or whomever might be looking for him.

As the train pulled up to the station in Kadin’s small, suburban, northern town, she took a deep breath of the crisp, cool near-winter northern air. She made her way back home more contented, calmer, than when she left. As she pushed her key into the old metal lock and opened the door, she was welcomed by the familiar scents and sights of home. Her husband waited for her in one of the worn chairs beside the fireplace. When she walked into the open entryway, he turned toward her and smiled a contented grin whose familiarity comforted her. Amidst the moments of connection, the moments of excitement, of meaning, she realized now that she also relished the moments of everyday experiences that had grown so easy to take advantage of. As she silently sat beside her husband in the second old chair, she realized that she had connection, though not as deep and profound as she had sought after. The connection to her own life, to other people, had sat next to her for so long that she had completely overlooked it in her search.

“How would you like to go out to the country sometime?” She laid a hand on top of his when she asked the question. “We could just take a walk beneath the stars, get away for a while.”





The next night, Kadin woke up again in the dead of night. She looked over at the bedside clock; the numerals 3:21 glowed back at her. As she slowly lifted herself out of her groggy state, she slipped her feet into the faded slippers that waited at the foot of the bed and quietly slipped out of the bedroom and towards the kitchen. She approached the old fire place slowly, contemplating her life as it had sped past her in the past few weeks. She opened the grates in the front of the fire stove, tossing in a few pieces of kindling and lighting them aflame. She dragged one of the old chairs closer to the fire, sinking into the familiar comfort of the old cushions, watching the glowing orange flames lick towards the top of the fire place.

As she tossed a log onto the growing fire, the memory of the co-worker she had fallen in love with briefly flashed before her eyes in the darkened room: the smile on his face as they sat in a small café downtown for lunch, the easy way he laughed and lightly grasped her hand when they went out for drinks after work, the electricity that sparked the air at times when he had walked up beside her, laid a hand on her shoulder. She also remembered the flashes of guilt she had felt each time the warm waves of emotion climbed up her body, setting her skin to a slow burn. The entire incident was one of emotion turmoil, excitement, and mystery. This was the man she had gone dancing with. After work, a group of friends and associates had spent an evening in a restaurant-turned-dance-club. Kadin had floated on the verge of euphoria, lost in the music that filled every corner of the small room. That night she had flirted carelessly with Leo, the co-worker she could not tear her eyes away from. Her inhibitions had been dashed to the ground, fought off by the beat of the music. He hadn’t advanced, though, hadn’t pursued her. In the end, as the music and the warmth of the liquor faded away into the background of the early dawn, Kadin faded back into her own reality. That night was the last time she had felt the slow burn of his soft touch. Afterwards, his presence did not seem to evoke the same feeling. The strange other-reality moments disappeared into an ocean of memories and reality once again became a series of fragmented moments steeped in nothing more than everyday reality.
She tossed another log onto the fire. The images swirling through her thoughts changed; it was another man, a friend of a friend this time.
Kadin remembered the scene well: she stood in her friend’s loft downtown; she looked out the large window that almost took up an entire wall-space and laughed easily with the hostess of the get-together and a good-looking stranger. She had noticed that the sky twinkled in the city, as well as in the country. Just beyond her friend’s window, though, Kadin saw the cityscape stretch out in front of her, instead of rolling countryside; the stars had fallen from the sky, trapped on the ground now, as lights in high-rise buildings and streetlamps, stretched out like a strange string of urban pearls.

When her friend left the window to get another drink, the good-looking stranger touched her hand lightly. He had been talking with Kadin and her friend – discussions of their respective jobs, life in the city, future plans that lay ahead of them, bland subjects that became more interesting with each drink. “Let’s go see the mountains.” His eyes sparkled as he made the proposition, excitement glimmering just beneath the surface.
Kadin raised an eyebrow. “What mountains?”

“Whichever ones are closest. I’ve got a good sized truck at home. We’ll just drive until we find them.”

Kadin eyed the glass in his hand. He must have had one too many martinis. The idea intrigued her, though. She was tempted to say yes, to leave with this strange man and drive until they reached the west coast, or the Appalachians. She watched him for a moment, trying to determine whether or not he was serious, whether or not he was actually ready to leave for a foreign countryside with a stranger.

He seemed sincere. He watched her, eager for an answer. “I…can’t.” She pulled her hand away from his and held her hands together in front of her. “I have to go home. I have a husband.” She flashed the wedding ring that adorned her slender finger.

The stranger smiled a strange, knowing smile. “That’s ok.” He shifted his gaze, searching the room for the hostess. “Maybe if you ever change you’re mind, if you want to travel, just get up and go somewhere, talk to Miriam. She knows where to find me.” He held up one of his hands and wiggled a finger that also bore a wedding ring. “I’m married too.”

Kadin merely blinked at him. As she reeled through the situation that had just played out before her eyes, she managed to pull herself away from this strange, intriguing man. “I’ll keep that in mind.” She smiled her goodbye and walked across the expansive room to say goodbye to her friend. She wouldn’t go with him, she thought. Ever. She had neither the courage nor the cowardice to run from her life.

Back in the reality outside the woodstove, Kadin watched the flames engulf the situations. One by one, she watched the moments, the potential for excitement in her life burn away, left with only the residual smoke of possibility haunting her life. Stolen moments, she thought, were all that we had. She had never chosen to chase those moments, for fear that it would rip her life apart. She often wondered if it would not be better to simply remember the fleeting moments of excitement, the potential of so much life-changing drama, to immerse herself in the greatest moments that had never really happened, then to chase these moments to the ends of the earth. For it was the ends of the earth to which these experiences would take her.

As she watched the fire burn itself out, she fell asleep in the comfort of her old, reliable chair. She didn’t dream. She awoke in the morning to the familiar sunlight spilling into the cold, abandoned kitchen.