He started writing with a furious intensity

He started writing with a furious intensity:

“He started writing with furious intensity. This is so rare to see these days. A man actually writing. Not typing. Writing. In a notebook. In his own penmanship. He brought a notebook with him. No, not a notebook, a journal. How old fashioned. How quirky. How inspired. Was that a special pen as well?”

The muse of public performance “struck him” while waiting for the train. He thought that people would take note. He thought that people would be curious. When he wrote, he dared not look up and around him. To do so would be a disruption to the intensity with which the muse struck him.

But he certainly hoped someone was taking note. He was hoping that someone was intrigued to find out what was on the page. To find out what the muse had given to him.

He finished writing the last word with flare, dashing the pen across the page with assertive finality. Then he violently tore the page from his journal, crumbled it up and threw it down on the ground. He turned his back to it and looked out into the distance until his train arrived. Then he boarded and was gone.

The coast is clear. Now those who were curious would have the opportunity to go and investigate. In his mind, a woman, perhaps the one with the long red scarf, would sidle up to the bench at the station, sit down, and nonchalantly pick up the page. She would stuff it in her pocket and board her train a few minutes later. Safely away from the scene of the crime, she would take the page from her pocket. She would uncrumple it as if she were savoring it. Then, she would flatten it out. Her eyes would be closed and then, after a long exhale, she would open her eyes and start to read.

But this isn’t what happened. The paper remained crumpled up under the bench. The glint of the gilded page drew the eye or curiosity of no passerby. The next morning, a janitor that spoke broken English mindlessly swept the page into a dust pan on a stick, dumped it in a trash bag, and later tied up that bag and threw it in the dumpster in the receiving dock behind the station below the tracks.