Commuter Recall Confessional

The ride from home to Neil's in the East Bay has become the stroll down Memory-- and sometimes Regret-- Lane.

With my MP3 player, my ear buds, my pen and pocket notebook, and a head full of smoke, I'm primed for my near-weekly journey.

I see (and hear over my music and noise-canceling ear buds) little Filipino girls playing together, sisters or cousins, three and five maybe, and I immediately think of Pinky.

And that makes me look deep into the rainy clouds and wonder how she is doing in her new life without me; my mind still running, though the train has stopped for a few minutes.

It's darker and colder out on this side of the Bay, and it's pouring rain. Just charcoal haze wall-to-wall, storming down, pissing ice cold water all over everything.

At the train's usual 75 mph (combined with the multi-directional wind and aforementioned pissing-down rain) , the scenery zipping by the windows is a stack of gunmetal, charcoal and slate grays with a ruffly belt of rich Spring greens.

And I'm still thinking about Pinky, but now another of the women that I've loved, and eventually lost, as well.

On days like this, rides like this, I always end up thinking of my long-lost G. My perfect, perfect lover gone so wrong.

Years of surviving her Mom's paranoid damage coated and covered everything and everyone in her lovely, yet injured, mind.

The love in her heart for me was a miraculous gift and I basked in it as often, and as long, as I could. She would probably say that I stayed too long.

Years ago, she moved out of her perfectly quaint mountain village home and hit the road, leaving me and many of our common friends far behind. Far behind her current incarnation in whatever place she eventually landed.

And as I near my stop and brace for the gray rain and cold wind in my face, I hope that somehow, some way, these beautiful women can one day forgive me, and in some part of their souls, remember me with love.