A Cold Hand to Hold

It is that kind of November morning that transforms individual breaths into a communal fog that continually and systematically replenishes itself.  At 7:15am, in a grey-skied Geneva, Switzerland, the train platform is flooded with patrons shifting their weight from foot to foot in a futile attempt to stay warm.  The pea-coated crowd looks down the track in eager anticipation for the train enroute for Lyon to arrive.  If it arrives.

Most of the bleary-eyed ticket holders attempted to leave Geneva the previous evening, but were denied due to an unanticipated train-employee strike that canceled locomotives for the day.  Several furrow-browed individuals hyperbolize on the personal inconvenience they experienced as a result, spinning a narrative akin to a Shakespearean tragedy.  But the train does arrive, to the convenience of all, and it's whistle hushes the complaints.

The crowd impatiently boards the train, filling every seat.  An older man with a full head of white, well-trimmed hair asks a slightly anxious looking girl if the seat next to her is taken.  She doesn't speak any French, but the man doesn't know that.  But, she nods in admission since the question is communicated clear enough through hand motions, and immediately returns her attention to a book held open on her lap.  The man takes his seat near the window as the train races from the station, as if in an attempt to make up for lost time.

The older gentleman notices her fingers and cheeks are flushed red, and comments instinctually on the observations.  She looks up from her half-read page in confusion and stammers in whispered English, "I'm sorry...I...I don't speak any French," shamed by her incompetence.

He doesn't speak much English, but he strains back through his cobwebbed memories in a desperate attempt to dust off some vocabulary from his grammar school lessons.  With gusto and a bit of chivalrous flair, he utters: "Hands...cold?"

She smiles at his obvious effort to communicate and nods.  They know there was nothing else to say in the absence of common language, so they simply settle into an agreed silence as the train clacks on the rails in the steady rhythm of kilometers passing by.

Later in the ride, the man looks over at the young girl again, and is unexpectantly swept into a bitter-sweet recollection of his own daughter.  She had once looked very much like this young woman seated next to him, but he had failed her as a single father.  His daughter had fallen into a bad way, due to the influence of friends and the absence of a mother's intuition, and had overdosed on some drug he couldn't remember the name of.  He enforced solitude sense then, as penance for outliving his progeny.

Suddenly the ache of melancholy floods him, and he doesn't see a stranger, he sees his daughter, innocent and healthy - and alive - seated beside him.  Reflexively, he reaches out to hold her hand, as if he could trap the memory of a better time in place between their palms.

The contrast of temperatures and textures - his warm, work-callused hand and her half-frozen, work-ignorant hand becomes a tangible thing.  The young girl starts and looks up confused, but the old man isn't looking at her.  He is lost in nostalgia, staring out the window, as individual tears danced down his emotion-worn face.

The girl at first thinks to pull her hand away from his gentle grasp, but then she sees his damp cheek, noting the glisten of a tear's wayward trail painted there, and she changes her mind.  She longs to say something sympathetic, but she doesn't speak any French.

Instead, she speaks in the only language they have in common: a simple holding of hands.  Even a cold hand can be warming in the attempt of wordless comfort.  So they remain just so, without a word, for the rest of the train ride.

The Lyon station sign glides past the window, and as the girl is sorry to get up, to break the enchantment of silent sympathy .  The man releases her hand at her first stirring, and their eyes meet in a brief farewell as she steps off the train, in France at last.

The train pulls away, carrying the old man on to a destination unknown to the girl.  She ponders on the trajectory of loneliness, which weaves you into the unknown lives of others without warning.  And in that moment, she discovers loneliness as the necessary condition to speak the deepest language of comfort, all without any words at all.

Then, quite suddenly, her hands are cold again.