Walk away from your dreams

You walk down the block to the nearest bus stop from your apartment, and set down your suitcases. The city meanwhile is already awake: garbage trucks rumbling through the streets, shopkeepers switching on their lights, and flocks of pigeons fluttering through the picture of urban decay that you have lived in for months. A city bus rumbles up to you, belching diesel smoke, and you step on.

You have been sneaking by with your expired student transit card, which you scan on the payment terminal. The terminal beeps at you, displaying a red X, and you look at the bus driver and shrug. He looks at you tiredly as only a city bus driver can and motions you on.

The bus rumbles through the streets of suburban Chicago, the neighborhoods becoming denser, less run down, as you approach the skyscrapers of the city center. You get off a block short of Union Station when you see some transit cops getting on the bus and decide that you need the exercise more then you need any trouble from them. Even as the morning sun shines down through the urban canyons that the glittering towers of glass and steel create the wind coming in off the lake is still cold and bitter.

When you get into Union Station, you wander down to the platform for your train which has all the beauty and grace of an underground car park that smells of piss, sit down, and give a deep 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 fluorescent 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 replied 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 wildlife of vagabonds, homeless, panhandlers, and buskers 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 for what must be hours. Your legs are jittery, your stomach growling, and you decide that you might as well get up and move around to keep your blood flowing, taking your suitcases with you.

You pop your head into a convenience stand inside the station, side eyeing the clerk, a bored and heavyset middle aged man playing on his phone, with the goal of filling your stomach. There’s not much that is actually nutritious, mostly just sweet and salty snacks. You grab a bottle of water, worth one dollar, from a refrigerator. You eye the clerk again, his eyes still on his phone. You maneuver so that you can shove a nearly a dozen granola bars into your pocket as you mosey up to the counter to buy the water, the clerk impatiently ringing you up, and beating a hasty retreat from the stand as he returns to his phone game.

Again wandering around the station interior, bags again in hand and pockets full of your ill gotten gains, you eventually find a relic of a different time bolted into the wall.

“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 coins into its slot.