We all asked him to go. Then we wanted him back. But by that point…
We were teenaged at the time, rash to make decisions and quick to change our minds.
A large group of us would hang out at the train station.
We never actually boarded a train, the station was just where everyone wanted to be,
because that’s where Danny was.
Danny was well liked and respected. He was fearless, clever, and protective of us all.
If a little kid was being teased, all it took was a warning from Danny
and the bully’s would back off. He didn’t only protect us from others,
but sometimes also from ourselves. If he caught one of his friend doing,
or even thinking of doing something destructive, he intervene weather invited to or not.
One day some punks from a few train stops down the line came to our station.
They started to tear apart the station, kicking down the hand rails, spray-painting the walls, knocking down the support beams with a baseball bat.
Before anyone knew what was happening the thugs started throwing kids down long staircases and in front of moving trains. Then they left before anyone knew what to think.
Danny was the first to react. He made sure all the injured were treated, and all the dead buried. Then he met the rest of us at the train station.
I’ve never scene anyone so angry. He was mad that it had happened at all,
that he couldn’t have stopped them. Now he wanted to fight, and the rest of us
encouraged him to. “It will happen again if you don’t go.” We told him.
“There will only be more mass destruction!” Danny boarded a train going
to a place none of us knew anything about, and somehow we felt good about this.
Time started to pass. We heard a little of him at first, it didn’t sound good.
Nothing seemed positive, it became hard to listen to, so we stopped listening.
Our lives carried on, making Danny an ever distancing memory for most.
Occasionally someone would remember that he was still over there,
and try to remind the rest of us. Sometimes my eye would be caught by one of the
“Support our Danny!” signs we mad when he first left. Now the sign was faded,
dirty, and sitting at a nearly abandoned train station.
One day we got word that Danny was coming back to us.
I tried to get a large group to meet him at the station, but as everyone else was busy.
I ended up being the only person there when he stepped off the train.
“Where is everyone?” He asked me. “Well…” I explained hesitantly.
“The kids from Student Counsel are in a meeting, disusing ways to
take little kids lunch money without loosing their vote.
The Academics Club is in the chemistry lab, developing new narcotics,
that haven’t yet been declared illegal by the government.
And the Cheerleaders are throwing a rally to support the legalization of murder.”
He looked at me a moment. “This is what I’m fighting for?”
He said getting back on the train.
I asked why he was going back, what he was accomplishing over there,
and when he would return for good. Danny never answered my questions.
Perhaps he thought I wouldn’t understand. Maybe I seemed ignorant to him.
It was an awful place, just a few short stops away, and I knew nothing about it, none of us did.
I sat at the train stop every afternoon, just waiting for Danny to come back.
Six years had passed since we had been vandalized.
When Danny left people stopped hanging out at the train stations, but this changed one day.
I was sitting alone, like always, when a fellow with big ears came and sat beside me.
"It’s time for Danny to come back.” Said this fellow. I agreed, but nobody else seemed to care. “We will make it an issue.” The strangely optimistic fellow explained.
“People listen and make a big fuss about things declared “issues”.
We’ll say that bringing Danny back is an important issue, then people will listen.”
This was a crazy concept, but surrounded by enough truth to seem plausible.
In no time the platform’s of the train station were flooded with people
insisting that Danny come home, and finally, his feet stepped off the train and into the crowd. Danny’s eyes searched the unfamiliar faces around him. His hands were prepared to fight,
but there was nobody here to fight. His legs were ready to run,
though he would never again need to run from anything.
He was not one of us, or one of them. Nobody knew who this was,
and thus we didn’t know how to treat him. Danny never really came back to us.
Something’s can’t be reversed. Some train’s don’t return.
Instead, they’re track is taken over be a different train altogether.
We all asked him to go.
Then we wanted him back.
But by that point Danny didn’t really exist anymore.
I’m not inclined to say if sending him was a good or bad decision,
I just hope next time we will be more carfull with our requests.
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