Emergency Break

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Our story begins one decade ago in a train cabin. It was a somber night filled with waves of white smashing against us like a storm hits the shore. We were moving forward heavily and nothing seemed more appropriate than lecturing my diary in which I keep all of my memories. Despite the howling wind knocking off the dunes rapidly aside, the atmosphere felt rather quiet. As hours flew by so did pages in my diary and I soon found myself drowned in nostalgia, one of my most common habits.

All of the sudden, the door opened vigorously and a girl about my age jumped in the cabin. She seemed so different from the girls I had met in Law School. Her hair was a little bit messy, but not in a way that would categorize her as untidy, her clothes were brightly colored and her lips were painted crimson. "Is there any spare seat in here?"

I was taken by surprise by her sudden entrance and it took me a moment until I was able to react. Her presence disconnected me from my world of memories and put me in a stasis of both stability and incertitude. We had never met, yet she seemed familiar.

"Of course. It's just me and my thoughts in here. Please, have a seat! Christopher, pleased to meet you!" I politely introduce myself.

"Kathleen, the pleasure is all mine. All the other cabins are overcrowded...this cabin has its own distinctive atmosphere. It is almost as if time has forgotten about it!" Then she gracefully approached the window, opened it with gentility and slowly inspired the cold air. For minutes she glazed outside observing the perfect chaos of the blizzard without saying a word. Her eyes were sparkling just like fresh snow in the morning.

"Seeing the snowflakes descending from above gives me the feeling of security. For me, they represent eternity. Looking at them is just like observing grains of sand flowing through an hourglass. I tend to become reckless and overenthusiastic at times but nature is my anchor. What is that leather book you are reading from?"

"This is my journal. I often write down things that happen to me and read them later. This and my habit of collecting vintage objects are my methods of connecting with the past. Sometimes, though, I focus too much on the past and lose contact with the present. I guess I should be more spontaneous."

As I was finishing the sentence, our train began decelerating until the point of it becoming static. Few moments later, the mechanic announced that due to meteorological issues we were stuck miles away from the closest station and only after the breaking of the dawns this situation could was to be remedied. However, not only the train froze in place, but time too. We spent the whole night narrating our life stories. I told her about my fear of letting things go naturally, about my timidity and lectured out loud files from my diary. She listened patiently, making me stop from times to times with her bright smile and a laughter that kept echoing in my mind, at first, but which soon found a path to the depths of my chest. The moment she started telling me about herself, the whole cabin got flooded with warmth. Her story felt like a carousel. She'd never enjoyed the severe lifestyle her family imposed to her ,so at the age of sixteen she decided to leave her home in search of a place that truly felt like a home. She became an artist, then worked as an apprentice at a tailoring workshop, nursed kids and at the moment she was travelling from town to town working as a volunteer at orphanages. Kathleen was everything I was not, an antonym to my whole being. We were of opposite poles and, as the laws of physics dictate, the force of attraction got us together.

But, one detail perplexed us. We had lived in the opposite ends of the same street, but went to schools located on each other's side of the neighborhood. For ten years we had walked pass by the other every single morning and afternoon. We had the feeling of knowing each other for a lifetime right from the beginning of our conversation because we actually did.

With every word spoken we were getting closer and closer to the point of us being inseparable.

Today, we are celebrating 10 years from the moment I was spontaneous enough to ask her to be my wife. And, just like back then, she is the emergency break I pull whenever I am about to slip from the railroads of reality.