And then the Dell slithered into action, moving with all the speed and magnificence that can only be observable in enormous lake-forming Glaciers. Yesterday was sort of a good day until the end hit. And by end, I don't mean apocalypse, I mean that whole "going home" part that inevitably happens at the end of each day.

Kat and I were standing on the LRT platform, and as we were discussing the short lifespans of various rodents along with the bargaining our parents seem to try and do in the most inopportune places (Canadian Tire, for instance, will not 'dicker' over the price of air compressors- no matter what eschelon you get to the till) when we heard a yell.

"Fuck off!" A girl screamed. And everyone turned- nothing like public melodrama to draw attention. A boy in a blue coat, with a broken arm was quite insistently pursuing her, not letting her escape his vicinity. He wasn't grabbing her or anything, but rather using his body to head her off as she tried to escape him. The entire time, he didn't raise his voice, and it just reminded me of being followed by an insistently violent dog intent on doing you harm. She was pretty upset, and then he grabbed her jacket and took it away from her, and she just got more disgruntled. It was obvious that there was an entire context of a story that no one knew, but I started to get worried. He had her jacket, and it seemed they would part ways because she was too seemingly frightened to get it back from him, but he still doggedly tailed her. Her voice was getting panicky as the bell dinged for the Claireview train, and reluctantly Kat and I boarded it, as the screaming and yelling on the platform escalated. She was very still and had started to cry (the girl) next to the escalator when we boarded the train. We could hear him insistantly asking for "my key, just give me back my key, and I'll give you back the jacket, ok?"

Several things: I felt terrible that no one intervened and maybe tried to mediate the situation. Ok, I felt terrible that I could have intervened and I didn't. I felt a disgusting feeling of concern as the train pulled away- and we could hear more screaming over the train even after we started moving past the last escalator. Also, there was a security guard that got on the train at Grandin that I could have said something to, but I stayed silent.

The funniest thing that came through my head though, was sort of perverse. I thought about how it was hilarious that we automatically all assume that the girl is the victim when we see something like this. We automatically side with the female- she's weak, right? Regardless of the situation, no one on that platform would have hesitated to bust that guy's ass if he'd even raised a hand to her. If she'd wailed on himphysically- we would have just let it be. A woman's rage is not as threatening as a man's? What the hell gives? Anyways, it was just interesting where the sympathy automatically fell. I was talking about this with Kat on the train, and got a few disgusted looks from old women...despite the fact that I was still concerned about her well-being. I am loathe of domestic violence- it's a pretty scary thing to endure.

I still flinch sometimes when I get those jovial punches in the arm from people I know would never intentionally hurt me. I toughened up a lot when I was friends with Myke and Dustin- violence was just a means to an end to them, and I learned to see it in a different light, as well as learning how to playfight again and not get scared, but I suppose stuff like this catches up on everyone every once and a while when they don't expect it to. It depends on how fragile the mood or temporary disposition.

No one intervened at the train station, as I may have stated prior. You could tell from the looks of concern in people's faces that they would have if it had escalated any further than it did- providing that their train did not arrive before then. It's sort of appalling actually (and I don't exclude myself from this) that acts of altruism or aid get more and more restricted to what is convenient to the individual faced with a certain situation. Would anyone have missed their train to ensure that those two were not left alone on the platform to kill each other? Of course not. I didn't, and it's sort of haunting me now. Didn't get my "mediation award" to just hop on a train and hope my concerned expression would send out care-bear blasts of love-rays to diffuse the situation after all. Argh.

  ¶ 11:38 AM