Departure Halls.

And finally, the end is drawing near. It feels as if the evening new's headlines should be proclaiming this somehow, that "The End Is Near". I have two nights left of my night shift week. And I am tired. I am spent.

This is what happens when you have a steady stream of seven hundred faces or so passing you by : if one of these customer (verbally) abuses you, the anger stays with you while the face does not. Your clenched fists, hidden under the counter shake with both anger and fear for minutes after and you do not know where to direct your blows, metaphorically or otherwise, when all the faces you see run into one. This also means that should the cause for this anger return for seconds, or for belated and useless apologies, they would be greeted with the same blind smile or indifference that every new customer that followed him is. That's not right. And what's even less right is that here are people, carrying luggage and life histories - here they come and there they go, all ending abruptly. Escaping through their different gates and, and if you will allow me the cliché, the great unknown. There is never any time for closure. Stay a spell, and talk to me. Tell me where you came from, and where life has you go. And where you hope to go.

Because you meet hundreds of travellers each day, and all that remains is a spectrum of smears. Smears, unexpected smiles and unwelcomed yells stay, so do the chemist's cupbaord of lipsticks lingering in the air where Your mouth once formed Its lovely little o's and ah's. Is it not sad that Your scent, having crept under the glass and intoxicated me and stolen my heart with You, away to Barbuda, away to Russia, away to London - that even that, captivating and cruel, dispells within minutes of Your departure. Sometimes I tuck Your bills away, in hopes of saving the perfume for later. Most times, your ball of bills, just as the fingertips that once touched them - become smears as well.

How sad to think - if you will permit another cliché - that at the end of the day, your life is filled with a collection of smears. And how terrible to know that You have been reduced to a smear Yourself. A scent, a gesture, a sigh.