Walk away from your dreams

The walk from your old apartment through the city to the train station is a long one, long enough that you are nowhere close to the station before your arms ache from carrying your suitcases. The city is already awake: garbage trucks rumbling through the streets, shopkeepers switching on their lights, and flocks of pigeons fluttering through the urban canyons of decay.

When you finally get to the station, you achingly sit down on a bench on the platform and sigh. You stack your suitcases in front of you, and put your feet up on them, more to protect them from theft than to be more comfortable, and more deeply sigh. Sitting still, you finally start to warm up. In the cold pre dawn light, you can see each of your breaths hanging in the air for a good long minute. You think about how you still have time to back out of this if you want.

“Though I only have pocket change.” You reply to yourself, bundling up tighter against the cold. “And that rat bastard’s rent is due today.” You shrug and then shiver.

You wait for a long time on that station platform, smelling the unpleasant smells of underfunded public transit and the local industrial park next door mixed together. Even when the sun finally peaks up over the buildings it is still horrifically cold. You find yourself increasingly bored sitting on the platform. Your legs are jittery, and you decide that you might as well get up and move around to keep your blood flowing.

Wandering around the station, bags again in hand, you eventually find a relic of a different time bolted into the outside wall of the station building.

“A payphone.” You observe. Your own smartphone has been useless for a long time now. Your phone bill was one of the first things that you cut once you fell on hard times. You set down your bags and fish around in your pocket for any change that you might have.

You pick up the payphone’s receiver and slot in some of your pocket change.