When I stepped rather heavily onto the platform, emerging from the eternally stagnant underground, I was filled with wonder at the pale shade of gray across the sky. So accustomed was I to the black sky and harsh lights of my evening commute that my heart flitters with joy at this faint, sickly hue. It seems to promise a daytime.
Maybe I missed it, as usual, but now I see the evidence of its passing. The sun, my salvation, that gray, my Fatima. If I could make a Crayola crayon that color, I would call it “Fatima Gray”.
Now that I think back and ponder that gray; as black, dead marshes illuminated by dubious warehouse lights stream by, I start to see it again, behind my eyelids. The only thing is, and maybe this is just my wistful, wishful imagination, but I start to see that gray as a little blueish. Now, surely my wants/needs/hopes/desires must be conspiring in some allegiance to mingle that blue in with the gray. They must be dredging up some long ago fathomless blue memory and splicing that beautiful, unappreciated Blue into my Hoboken Gray. Because the pure, free blue I see now, lurking behind my Fatima Gray could never exist in Hoboken, amid the monstrous engines and their noise and poisonous smoke, never in the New Jersey sky. But I guess that is what Religion is all about. Heaven cannot exist here on Earth, in the mud.