Accident

It all happened so quickly. All I could see was this figure in front of an approaching train. Brownish the jacket was, or was it grey? And that shape, that figure, that living and breathing human being , just disappeared under the carriage. Barely five metres away. So close to me. We were breathing the same air. For a few moments we stood on the same platform before... Before the person fell? Before the person got pushed? Before the person jumped? I can still hear that piercing  screeching sound as the train came to a halt, with the front carriage and driver's cabin immediately  in front of me. The driver came out, his face full of fright, pale and his mouth muttering disbelieve. How he must be feeling at that very moment... 

"Personal injury at track level" the driver just announced. That is what they describe it as ? I walked out of the station around 15 minutes after I saw it all play out before my very eyes. I felt so sick, so sick! I was shaking, felt my stomach churn and chest sucking in. I am still feeling sick, and for lack of a better word, shellshocked. 

I cannot shake off that image. Horrendous image and the thought that someone got crushed under the wheels, got run over and swallowed into that dark abyss under the belly of the subway car at North York. I had jitters and pangs of falling off the platform when I just stepped into another subway car. 

And I cannot shake away the sound of two ladies wailing and crying immediately after that. "It's not a dream! It's real..." One of them kept saying while she sobbed and teared. She was so shaken, visibly much more than I was, perhaps it happened right in front of her. The station staff came and just ushered people out and told us to go find the replacement shuttles. The two ladies were visibly shaken and traumatised.  A fellow passenger, in a show of genuine human  compassion, hugged one of the ladies who could not stop crying, who kept on saying "It's not a dream... I saw it! I saw it!" Trauma and raw emotions do not know the boundaries of racial or cultural differences.  

I look around the metro car now. For most people the interruptions to the routine service, and occasional announcements about the interruptions, are just a nuisance and inconvenience. For the people who were on that very platform, at approximately five to one in the afternoon, me included, the world has somehow changed and become more shaken, dangerous and filled with a sickening, sickening aftertaste. 

Later, I heard a station staff casually say to a passenger who complained to him on an overcrowded platform: "Someone jumped the tracks". From his tone, it was as if it was nothing out of the ordinary. Would he say it so casually if he saw it with his own eyes and cannot shake that image? Would he shrug it off and just go about his daily life unaffected?