The Torment of Hatred

The Train Station

I stood tall and brave against the wind that was determined to sway me as I faced the arriving train. Steam and people alike filled the station around me, but their voices were white noise in my mind as it was just me and my ticket alone in the world, the only things that mattered to a weary, unsure teenager. The stains of a thousand worries marked my face but not a tear was found in the bags under my eyes, no matter how deeply you searched them. Nobody demanded this show strength, of course; my grandparents would understand any display of grief, even if I collapsed on the platform and cursed the world right then and there. The death of not one parent, but both mother and father, was enough to tear away at any resolve, especially one of such young age, a mere 17. But I didn't feel as though I was displaying any feat of strength with my absence of sorrow. I just felt so little in that moment that the only thing in my chest was the lack of feeling. I was nobody in that moment; Ernesto Philip Hernandez did not exist, or quite possibly, never had. I didn't care for a name for I identified myself by my destination, the Cayey Seminary School in the carpeted mountains of Puerto Rico.

The whistle blew from what felt like far off, but suddenly the train was before me and the tug of a new life manifested itself in the curt nod I presented to my grandparents before I turned to board. I didn't blame them for sending me off to the school like this, I wouldn't want to have to deal with the shell of an adolescent either. It had only been three months since both my papi and mama had swerved over that bridge and embraced their watery deaths together, but my grandmother explained to me that it was best to go to school this soon so I could deal with my grief and learn to have a greater purpose in God rather than my own self. I don't really believe her, but it doesn't matter, because I wouldn't have known what to do with myself if I stayed in my hometown of Dorado.

I once contemplated tracking down the man whose intoxicated state had caused him to crash into the side of their car and push them off the bridge. But what would I do if I had caught him? I didn't have the guts to kill him, at least not with my own hands. Maybe i'd have tied him up and tossed him off the same bridge. Maybe i'd have just asked him why. Maybe he would have killed me first, but maybe I wouldn't have cared.

Either way, he was being imprisoned by the state this very moment so I was content with allowing him to wallow in guilt and thoughts like alcohol to drown his pain in. I turned into a small, empty compartment of the train and sat in the corner by the window, gazing out to see my grandparents smile apologetically at me, wave, and then turn and disappear into the crowd. The train's whistle blew again and the sound pulled my eyes closed, washing the remnants of a past life away with darkness. I was no longer alive, but about to be reborn into a new life of knowledge and service. Sleep chipped away at my subconscious, and I dreamed of nothing.