The train left at 19:40, and at 19:39 I was still standing on the platform.
Feri was there beside me, with two tickets in his hand. He had bought one for me. He did not ask whether I wanted it — he just bought it, because that is the kind of person he is. He always had a plan, and his plans always had room for me too.
“If you don’t get on,” he said, “you will never know what it would have been like.”
“If I do get on,” I said, “I will never know what it would have been like if I had stayed.”
That was the whole problem, and it could not have been put any more cleverly.
I was eighteen. Two weeks before my school-leaving exams, Mum said: “You’ll work it out.” Mum always said that when she did not know. I do not blame her: nobody knows what to say to an eighteen-year-old who does not know what they want.
The train was going to Vienna. Feri was going for a job: six months, money, experience, then home. That was the plan. He would not have asked me if he did not believe I had to go.
“You wouldn’t have come for me,” he said, when he saw my face. “You’d have come for yourself.”
That was the best and the worst thing about Feri: he always knew what was happening inside me before I did.
Six people stood on the platform. An old lady with a suitcase, two boys with headphones, a man on the phone, and the two of us. It was the end of summer, and the air was already cool, and the rails were as bright as something waiting.
“If I stay,” I said quietly, “I lose three months anyway. Not with you. With myself.”
Feri nodded. He did not ask what that meant, because he understood.
“Then don’t get on,” he said.
“And the ticket?”
“I’ll throw it away.”
“That’s a waste.”
“No, it isn’t.”
The train pulled in. The brakes screeched, the doors opened, the old lady got on, so did the two boys, the man finished his call and vanished into the carriage. Feri left the ticket in my hand and looked up at me.
“You don’t have to decide your whole life now,” he said. “Only this train.”
And then I understood. The decision was not about whether Vienna was good or bad, and not about whether I loved Feri. It was about whether I could say no to something good — because you have to be able to do that if you want to choose, later, the thing that is really yours.
The train started.
Feri stood at the window and did not knock, did not wave, did nothing cinematic. He only looked, and his mouth moved: “Next summer.”
I looked back and nodded.
The platform emptied. The rails stayed, the lamps stayed, and there was a ticket in my hand with the date written on it.
I did not throw it away. I took it home and put it in the drawer, among my old school exercise books.
Two weeks later I sat my school-leaving exams. Two months later I went to work in a bookshop, because there was a place there and because I loved books. A year later I applied to the course that interested me — not the one that was expected of me.
Feri came home the following summer. On the first evening we sat down in front of the house, and he said:
“Now do you know what it would have been like if you’d got on?”
“No,” I said. “But I know what it was like not to get on.”
Feri smiled, and said:
“Then that’s good. Because it’s the things we do that we need to know about, not the things we don’t.”
The ticket is still in the drawer. Sometimes I take it out and read the date — not because I regret it, but because it reminds me: the most important decisions are not made on the big journeys, but on platforms, in a single minute.
