i’d Been Putting Off

I’ve been putting off all day, going down, getting on the train, ya see, I need to head over to my Daughters house, go put together a play house for my Grand Daughter. Way late, I get down to the station, head down the stairs to the platform where there is this girl standing on the edge, she looked like she was on the edge! Over the speakers I’m hearing step away from the edge. Me, like everyone, we’re all just watching this girl as the train is pulling in. Two guys step up, move her back, the train pulls in slow, stops short, doors open, so people start loading in, so anyhow, through all this, that girl started walking down the other side of the platform, on the edge again, walking away from the train. This train was at the end of its run, the operator got off, got told about the situation, started walking slow up behind her, she was almost to the end by the time he caught up. He had got there just in time, she was just getting around the fence by the end of the platform, he got a hand on her! I had decided to roll up behind, as I closed in, I heard him telling her she really didn’t want to do that, he eased her back around the fence, she was crying, she still had some sparkle, high on her cheeks, just a little bit, who knows, maybe from the night before, she really was beautiful! The train operator moved her back a bit from the edge, her eyes were racing though, I rolled my bike up, locked my front wheel inside the steel slats of the fence, sort of a barricade. So she started moving over to the other side of the platform, the train operator right at her side, he just kept talking, talking on his radio too, I rolled my bike to the other side and locked my wheel in again. She started looking like she wanted to make a break, she started back the other way again, as she walked by a concrete column along side a back wall, I took my bike and trapped her in, i just made it so she couldn’t bolt, we were telling her to relax, to sit down, that the sheriff would be there soon, she said she really hated cops, I told her well yea, we all do, I asked her name, she said Alahandra, she said she was nineteen. She said now she was fine, she wanted us to let her get on her way. I asked her if this was all over a man, she said yea, I asked her if this was her first, she said no, I said, then you know what’s up, she said yea, she laughed a little then, I think that’s when we began breaking through! We all just kept talking, we asked about her family, about brothers and sisters, about school, she said she was an only child, said she was studying psychology in college, I told her she would surely ace this chapter, she said if only the earlier train hadn’t started going back the other way that she would be dead, that she wouldn’t be going through all this, I asked her if she’d been giving things away, if all her business was in order, about how badly her Mother and Father would feel upon hearing bad news, I asked her if she had cleaned her room? You know, I got a how did you know kind of look back from her, I told her my Mother and Father had just recently died, I started to cry a little too. The Purple Line, Wilshire and Western Avenue, the end of the line, she wasn’t from this neighborhood, thank God, she had no idea of what she had walked down into, thank God for her poor plan! This all was all taking a lot of time, the cops were slow to show, Warren, the operator kept going to his radio, about 20 minutes or so we waited, she really didn’t want to see those cops, these guys, often when they show, can be real jerks. I told her she needed to do whatever they said, that they weren’t gonna take her to jail, that they were coming to help. She started freakingà a little as she saw the boys coming down the stairs, a gang of four, all business, but they were cool! I have no envy of their job, not knowing what the hell their walking into, in not so typical fashion they just let Warren and me be, they talked with us, we filled them in, they didn’t feel a need to move in right away, they started talking with her too. She said her heart hurt, it broke my heart hearing that from her, the cops told her what was going to happen, they told me I could move my bike away, they moved in close. She wasn’t too happy. The cops were trying to be easy with her, explaining to her what was going to happen, they didn’t want to cuff her up, she was resisting, they really didn’t have a choice. It started getting worse, she was squirming, she was screaming the cuff’s were too tight, she started buckling her knees. I stepped in and told her remember what I told her before, to do whatever they say, don’t fight, that right now you have no choice, that these guys were here to help you. So strange, she gathered herself up, and started walking with the sheriff’s, I rolled my bike along side, trying to reassure, telling her, just be cool, to forget that man who didn’t care, that man that caused her heart to hurt, that these four guys helping her really did care, that they would take good care of her, she smiled just a little, those cops smiled just a little too.