101. ...dozy eyed to the woman I love,

(Travel poem)

Kathleen by Paul Lambie.

She nudged me awake so's I could mind the purse and handbag she’d placed on the train table in front of her now empty seat. I looked up dozy eyed to the woman I love stood in the aisle and smiled. Eyes met, she points at the items for safeguard. I nod and she walks off. No words said.

At the end of the carriage she found the toilets occupied and I realised while she was caught for a few seconds, framed perfectly, in the curved glass reflection of the train window, that I love her more now than when we were first married.

She stepped courteously aside to let a commuter at his bike and I lost her from view. My heart lurched. I switched my attention to the handbag and purse, my first priority until her return. Determined to protect her effects from theft or nefarious snatch and run attack. If any thug so much as glances this way they'll get my scariest look back.

You needn't bother son, this whole table is under my protection.

Here she is, back from the toilet, the woman who holds my heart. Stand down. No need for heroics on my part. She opens her bag to get hand sanitizer, offers me a squirt and though I accept, I tell her I realise her love is all I need.

She displays one of my favourite withering looks and says, "and food and water and your mum, dad and sister and our son" and I say "yes and open space for a run and my best mates and books and three more enamel camping plates with the blue edging and matching bowls and one more Sonos player", but I explain, in the moments she was gone I missed her and I love her and if she wasn't my wife I think she'd be the woman I'd spot, reflected in a train window, who’d inspire in me courage to get up and say hello and we'd talk in the aisle even though we both had seats, and after a while I'd ask her out on a date and we'd go see a comedy show and I'd belly laugh out loud even though I'd have a nervous tummy ache, because I'd be sure, despite only recently meeting, that I loved her and my love would always grow and I'd clear my throat and bend my knee and I'd ask her to marry me please.

My imaginary me is a bit of a fast mover.

I do love her, it surprises me, more and ever more. I wonder whether the growth in intensity will stop or eventually level out, or if, in our old age, with fragile hearts, I’ll pop.

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Out loud version.

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I also realised that I've been writing some tricksy emotionally difficult stuff of late so a little light love and romance might be in order.

Kathleen isn't a minimal line drawing. She's a real, complicated and multidimensional human. She loves me and protects me when I'm fragile and laughs with me and teamed up with my mum to get me tickets to see my comedy hero Stewart Lee in Glasgow last week.

I wrote this quickety quick on the train so's to delay the forgetting of that wee moment of catching sight of her in the window.

A friend asked if i might record it so’s he could hear it in my voice and a small happy tear sprung up. I spent an hour reading it into my phone and changing the bits that tripped me up. I added that in.

Thanks for being there.

I love you too just not in the same way.

Paul.