The South Line Lament 

"Tacoma Dome Station. The train is now approaching Tacoma Dome Station."

South really liked riding the trains.

The bump of the rails, the chattering of voices around him, the predictability of the schedule, and the route ahead, all soothed the cracks of the mind.

He didn't always have this fascination. He used to find them just lengthy, yet necessary since he couldn't drive and buses only went so far.

But that was before he lost everything.

In a random attack at the train station, draining him of all his blood, an unknown assailant killed him and turned him into something vile.

Maybe it was remorse, maybe it was some perverse desire, but for whatever reason, it broke South.

Every piece of himself before that day at the train station was shattered, and in its place were ephemeral fragments that, even after two decades, could barely be put together.

But recently, one of them came together ever so slightly.

"Those flowers will drown" Across from South's seat was a ghostly female figure, with a black void for a face. Luckily it was a window seat, so one look at the reflection told South this was another one of his hallucinations, and he merely grabbed the bouquet of flowers at his side and departed the train.

Those apparitions were the fragile pieces of his memories left over. Much like how a dream cannot create new faces, he would always see the ghosts of the past, either people who were important to him or one of the many members of the uncaring crowd that didn't look his way while he was drunk empty.

It was a pain in the ass and took him many years to get a hang of, telling apart who was real and who wasn't, and even now he could still get tripped up as new faces entered his memories, but they only showed up when he was hungry or really going haywire.

Or, like today, when he was really stressed.

A week prior, he had been walking near the university campus downtown, when he saw a woman with short brown hair and a distinctively round and kind face. He sat and stared for a bit, as he had seen that woman in his visions a million times over, or so it felt like, and he was waiting for whatever nonsense or portent of disaster was waiting for him.

But when the light on the crosswalk changed, she just walked forward like normal and waited for the light rail. This was already strange enough, but what sealed the deal was when his friend needled him a bit, asking "Why were you staring at that chick, huh?"

With some of his connections and a lot of scouring, he eventually found out her name: Nora Hudson, and that she had lost a son 20 years ago, Seth.

South's memories still couldn't dredge up any guarantees, but what he had found was better than nothing, and he needed to know for sure.

As he stepped from the train station, he caught the bus lines necessary to make the journey to where a particularly insightful friend had spotted her having a drink with a friend, at a bar down by the Foss waterways.

With each step, he saw more and more of the ghostly figures, and even some apparitions of inanimate objects, like posters and picture frames hanging from the street signs and bus stops, but he paid them no mind and pushed forwards, towards his goal.

Walking down the curving steps from the glass museum to the waterway's path, he spots the restaurant, he spots the outdoor seating, and he spots her.

And he freezes.

"It's been 20 years!" His own voice rings from a faceless passerby

"She won't remember you."

"She won't understand!"

"You don't even understand yourself."

"You don't even remember yourself!"

"What the fuck am I doing?" He panicked in his own thoughts. "No! I-I went this far! She's real! She's really real! I can't pass up this chance!"

But as he got closer, to the edge of the outside seating, he caught the other woman's attention, who pointed him out. And as the brown-haired woman turns in her seat,

She has no face.

Merely that same black void, as even her features turn pale and ghostly.

The woman who pointed her out, a black void.

The other people who were seated, a black void.

"B-But, she was real! M-My friend pointed her out?"

South could swear that he heard some words being said, but he began to wonder.

It was just the two of them, was his friend real at all? Were his contacts real? Was the information real? Was anything he had been seeing real? Or just another fragment of memory coming to haunt him with no resolution?

In a daze, he turns and quickly runs from the scene, and as he passes the edge of the walkway, he throws the bouquet of flowers into the water, his own senses not even catching the splash.

And he runs all the way back to the train station and steels himself to a decision.

Nothing in his past is ever going to truly be real, so the person he was should be kept at rest. What's dead should stay dead.

"Well, that was quite weird." The woman's friend said to her, as South departed the scene.

"Yeah, poor kid, he looked really panicked." The brown-haired woman replied.

"You know, not to sound crazy, but he kinda looked like-" The friend began.

"Oh, please don't say it, I was thinking it too but, if I got my hopes up every time I'd never move on."

Her friend raised her hands in silent understanding, and the two continued their conversation as normal.

"It is a shame though," she thought of the flowers that South had been holding, "Hyacinths are really pretty, they're one of my favorite flowers."