I’m sitting there on the morning commute, wondering why the new-fangled trains on the 4 line so often get this strange smell—it’s not quite bum stench and it’s not quite chemical, but there’s definitely a hint of urine in there somewhere—when BAM! out of nowhere, I see a vision of M.

There. Right there. She’s sitting on her suitcase, leaning against the pole, wearing a pair of funky sun glasses and a winter coat that looks like it’s been made from scraps of the throw rugs my grandmother used to have in her kitchen. I’m standing next to her. Her head rests on my hip and I stroke her hair. It’s a 4 Train, an older one, clattering along from Grand Central Terminal, heading back to my place in Brooklyn. It’s the last time I’ll see her on a New York City subway.

The vision, the way it comes, puts me in mind of a 400-pound go-rilla (for some reason, that’s the way the voice in my head pronounces it: Go-rilla) that’s decided I look like a banana. And after knocking me down, it’s just sitting on my chest, staring down at me as if to say “Nothing you can do, chump.”

I want to turn to the guy next to me, the guy in the suit reading the Journal, and ask him “Why?” Ask him, perhaps, “When will this stop happening?” Ask him for a little help.

Wait. No. He’s reading the Journal. He won’t care. I need a Post reader, someone falling asleep on his morning commute. Someone who’ll bust my chops for being a wimp but who just might pull me off at the next stop and bring me to a bar and buy me a shot of Jack Daniels and a beer in a Styrofoam cup as big as my head.

But instead, I sit here, my breathing deeper now as I try to get my bearings, try to deal with the vision and wish it away. I should never have gotten involved with a pole-leaner in the first place.

It was the Q Train I took to meet M. January 29, 2004. I believe it was seven or so and I was in such a hung over stupor—yes at seven at night—that I didn’t even think to be nervous. It had been a strange week up to that point—which is saying something considering it was only Tuesday. I’d had a second date on Sunday. On Monday, I’d spent the entire night doing what it is that a couple of coworkers do when one is in from a far-away office and has a hotel room and both are extremely drunk. Tuesday day, I sat through endless conference meetings wearing Monday’s clothes and enduring the whispers of my coworkers.

And here I was on the Q, going to meet M. for the first time, suffering from one of those hangovers that puts in sharp focus the kind of life you’re living, the bad choices you’ve made and continue to make, the countless hours squandered away on bar stools, on the couch, on a damn seat on the subway. And what was I doing? Taking another go at yet another internet date, someone from Florida, who lived in Texas and was, two days later, moving to Brazil for a semester. I knew damn well what I was doing. It was safe. More safe, even, than the co-worker from another office hookup. And no doubt I’d have yet another bout of hung over self-loathing on the commute to work the next day.

The Q is not a train that I take very often, and I still find it special, moving almost, when it comes out of its hole to crawl across the bridge and I’m confronted with Manhattan. It was snowing that night, hard enough to blur the skyline. There was a small woman, Peruvian or Ecuadorian, sitting across from me, sleeping. Bundled up in her coat, with its fur-lined hood, she looked like an Eskimo. In the time it took to get across the bridge, the snow picked up in intensity. It was an actual blizzard. We’d get two feet of snow that night and somewhere between boozing at Old Town and meeting Boy George at Bowery Bar, my dumb ass went and fell in love.

There’s no need to go into a detailed description of M. Sometimes these things click. Sometimes, there is a little cupid sitting up there somewhere and that night he put away his bow and arrow and hit me with a Tec-9. I’m not going to say I was happy about it, but I didn’t have a hangover the next day, not the self-loathing type at any rate. A guy could do worse—much, much worse—than to fall in love with someone like M.

Here’s all you need to know about M. Three months later, M. was back from Brazil, in the states for a conference in Boston. After a wave of old-fashioned pen-on-paper letter writing and plenty of emailing, she’d decided I was safe enough to stay with when she came down to New York for a few days. At one point during the stay, amid too much drinking and nerves and holding hands in public, we found ourselves on the L Train from her friend’s place in Williamsburg into Manhattan. We were slouched against each other, in our own private worlds, the murmur of brainless conversation coming from the ska-boy skinheads sitting across the car washing over us. Without warning, one of them let loose with the following: “Then I told her ‘Suck my cock and call it God.’” It was as pure a subway moment as one could hope for, a phrase that needed no extra comment. What, after all, can one say to answer or expand upon “Suck my cock and call it God”?

Of course, men and women have famously disparate opinions on what is funny. But the minute the Deified Dick Duo departed the train, M. let loose with that loud laugh of hers and I was pleased. It’s not every day you can find a woman who recognizes a once-in-a-lifetime cock comment and finds it the funniest damn thing of the day.

It was a short day. A short week. Too soon, it was time for her to leave. Back to Brazil. And that’s where the vision comes from. It was her last day in town. It was then that she sat on the luggage, a cheap thing she bought in Chinatown so that she could stuff it with peanut butter and Clearasil and other nonsense that was hard to get or expensive in Brazil. It was then she leaned on the pole. It was then that my heart started hammering, I started wondering what the hell I was going to do with myself once she left. I was up to my eyeballs now.

But with near-heroic restraint (for me), I tried to keep my mouth shut about it. Of course, a blind woman could have seen me coming from a mile away. Still, I held off until the trip down to Brazil. If this were fiction or “creative” non-fiction, I could place myself on the Rio Metro when I uttered those infamous three words. But the Rio Metro is a strangely quiet place, missing a lot of the character of its New York counterpart because its poor population is so broke they can’t even afford to get a ride on the subway. No, we sat quietly on the Rio Metro, she exhausted from dragging my non-Portuguese speaking butt all over the place, me brooding over the fact that when I said “I love you” in the hotel room the night before she didn’t say it back.

Perhaps I should have cut and run. I’d thought this all out before hand. I told myself that, at 30, I was too old for half measures, especially when involved with a long-distance relationship. I’d spent too many years in my younger days tilting moony-eyed at female windmills. Then again, I’d also sworn off long-distance relationships long ago and there I was riding the subway on another fucking continent.

But I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. She’d come around.

Of course, she didn’t.

Yes. All this is is a breakup story.

And even that’s tied up with the subway.

The breakup happened at work, over IM, because that was the way it had to happen. Why the breakup? That’s not important. The usual crap about commitment and space and being friends—all those things a person says when the little fire has gone out and she just wishes the other person would go quietly away.

I took it well. It baffles me why so many people think an IM breakup is something cheap or tawdry. Hey, I wasn’t going to blow 40 bucks on an international call to Brazil just to get my ass dumped. So, yeah, I did okay with the breakup.

Or so I thought. Because then I was faced with the train ride home. A Tuesday afternoon. How fitting is that? Forty minutes. And I had to make it without engaging in public male crying. Even on a slightly off day, the rogue’s gallery of humanity that is the subway makes me want to weep. But this was something else entirely, and I had no clue how to handle it. Mock it all you want, but there’s still a threat of public breakdowns among those of us who walk the world sans Paxil.

But I handled it. I kept the upper lip stiff despite the bright fluorescent lights glaring down on my defeat, despite the fact that every person on the train represented a friend or family member to whom I’d have to explain the breakup.

This little cavalcade of crap was clattering around in my cranium when, with five minutes left before my transfer at Nevins, he walked in.

“EXCUSE ME LADIES & GENTLEMEN. PARDON ME FOR THE INTERRUPTION.”

A United Homeless Organization “worker.” And not just any UHO guy. Oh no. It was the guy with that condition, the one that makes it impossible to modulate the voice. Flat bass tone, with the volume set at 11.

“WE ARE AN ORGANIZATION THAT CLOTHES AND FEEDS THE HOMELESS.”

I never wanted to jump out of a moving train so badly. I never wanted to kill an innocent stranger with my bare hands.

I started up a little chant in my head.

“Sonofabitch. Motherfucker. Keep it together. … Sonofabitch. Motherfucker. Keep it together.”

And it worked. The rhythm. The profanity. It calmed me enough so that I could make it home, where I cried like a 13-year-old girl who just watched Leonardo DiCaprio slip beneath the icy waves in Titanic. There’s no shame in that. Right? RIGHT?!

So these are the things that haunt me on my current commute. This is where the go-rilla sits on my chest, the world gets faint, my breathing gets labored and I’m plagued with the questions. Why did she do it? What did I do wrong? Is there something wrong with me? Should I have fought harder? Am I doomed to a life of solitude, growing old in a run-down rent-control East New York apartment, eating cat food not because it’s cheap, but because it tastes better than canned tuna?

It says something that these episodes are powerful enough to make subway stench—of any sort—irrelevant. This particular morning, though, my reverie is interrupted by a cliché. A chubby chocolate hand grabs my shirtsleeve and tugs. It startles me at first and I turn quickly, perhaps too quickly, and find a one-year old boy staring at me and laughing himself silly. He’s cooing and singing and chirping and smiling and looking right at me as if to say, “Lighten up.”

What does he know? He’s sitting on his mother’s lap. The only thing he’s ever known of women is that they hold him and tickle him and clothe him and put their breasts and other assorted nipple-type objects in his mouth.

Still, there is one thing to be thankful for. Because this was a long-distance relationship, I don’t have my every haunt and hangout tainted with memories of M. Thank God it’s only the Q Train on a snowy night, the 4/5 intermittently and the L Train, well, forever, that have been poisoned. Oh, and the Metro in Rio. But that shouldn’t be an issue.

As it is, I’m only now able to face my computer—where we spent hours a day instant messaging like teenage dorks. Only now does the sound of my roommate playing Spider Solitaire, which M. played often, not twist my gut. And I still cringe at the mentions of Brazil, Florida and Texas. You’d be surprised how often Brazil comes up once you notice it. And Florida and Texas? Well, if you’re a college football fan and a political junkie, that tends to pose a problem. I mean, hell, I found myself just the other day cheering for Oklahoma, which for me is the equivalent of cheering for Osama Bin Laden.

So, yes, thank God that I don’t imagine her in my arms every time I’m standing on the Grand Army Plaza platform. And thank God that I don’t run the daily risk of finding her in a seat on the 2/3, twisting a strand of hair or scratching at her nose ring while she reads. Or running into her on the 4/5 flirting with her latest victim. And I shudder to think what kind of Grade A meltdown I’d have if, drunk at 2 in the morning, I saw her on the platform across the tracks making out with someone. Or worse again, we ran into each other on a Saturday morning on trains we had no business being on, each returning from a night of … well, I’m obviously not ready to put that into writing.

Ken Wheaton was born and raised in Opelousas, Louisiana. His short stories have appeared in Briar Cliff Review, Hampton Shorts, Southwestern Review and Proteus. His most recent short fiction, "Act of Contrition," was nominated by Briar Cliff Review for the Pushcart Prize.  He currently lives in Brooklyn and is marketing his first novel.