Waiting for the Last Train

Maya was born in a town so small,

even the sky seemed closer to the ground.

On the day of her birth, it rained quietly—

her mother said the heavens wept softly,

but not out of sadness—

it was the kind of rain that waters something new.

They called her the “girl of light,”

but shadows met her early.

Her father never returned from a distant war.

No last letter, no goodbye—just a silence

that lingered around their dinner table for years.

Her mother raised her with tired hands and quiet strength,

kneading dough with one hand, wiping tears with the other.

Maya learned early that love

was sometimes absence wrapped in memory.

In school, she was the quiet one—

not because she had nothing to say,

but because she carried too many words inside her.

She wrote poems on scraps of paper—

about rivers, birds, and futures she dreamed of.

She desired to fly; not in airplanes,

but in her own story—

away from expectations, away from limits.

Then came Abhra.

With eyes that smiled before his lips did.

With words that felt like songs.

He made her laugh like she hadn’t in years.

And for a while,

love felt simple,

safe.

Until it didn’t.

He left with another,

leaving behind

a coffee mug, a photograph,

and silence where promises used to be.

Heartbreak didn’t break her—

it remade her.

So she packed her poems and left town.

She moved to a city that didn’t know her name,

rented a small flat

with a leaky tap and thin walls,

got a job that barely paid the bills—

but it paid her enough to survive.

By day, she answered emails and brewed cheap coffee.

By night, she wrote.

She poured every ache into pages,

stitched every scar into a story.

The city moved fast,

but she moved inward,

toward the self she had abandoned long ago.

Years passed like pages turned too quickly.

Then one day,

a publisher read her blog

and asked, “Do you have a manuscript?”

She did.

It was called

“I’m Still Alive, So I Write.”

The book became her voice

in rooms she had never entered.

People read it and wept.

Some said, “I saw myself in you.”

Others whispered, “You wrote what I could never say.”

Maya became someone.

But she never forgot the girl who had been no one.

Now, on quiet nights,

she walks to the railway station.

Not to catch a train,

but to listen to the sound of leaving.

The final nighttime train— its whistle cuts through the dark

like a question that never gets answered.

She watches strangers depart—

wondering where they’re going,

who they’re missing,

what version of themselves they’re trying to find.

She never boards.

But the act of watching reminds her—

movement exists,

even when you feel still.

Sometimes she wonders

if healing is just waiting at the platform

without knowing the schedule,

but hoping for light anyway.

She holds no bitterness for the town she left,

or the boy who broke her.

Without them,

she wouldn’t have become

the woman who writes storms into silence,

the woman who listens for trains she’ll never take.

In the hush between whistles and wheels,

she tells herself,

“You’re not lost.

You are waiting.

And waiting is also a kind of courage.”

Author’s Note

This piece, “Waiting for the Last Train,” is more than a story—it is a quiet confession.

It was born from the ache of unresolved goodbyes,

the beauty of ordinary survival,

and the unspoken strength found in waiting without guarantees.

Maya’s journey mirrors the lives of so many women—

and not just women, but anyone

who has ever been left behind,

anyone who’s learned to live with both hope and heartbreak

in the same chest.