A girl on a train sits watching the outside world wiz by from her relatively safe seat by the window. It rushes past faster than her eyes can truly detect any details. She sees enough to think the scenery nice, the landscape pretty. She doesn’t have time to see all the obscure going-ons and minor affairs. The pace of her train car doesn’t allow for minute pieces of information to be obtained.
She sees a small, brown house with white shutters. She thinks, that’s a nice, straight house. It has lovely angles. Then she sketches it in a notebook she is holding in her lap. What she doesn’t see is the woman crying inside the house. All alone, the woman sits beside a cradle and clutches at a phone she is struggling to dial.
The girl on the train sees a large tree, which has intricately gnarled branches and a large bird perched on one. She jots down a few lines describing the scene at face value. As she scribbles her notes, she completely misses the dead root structure, which reveals that the tree itself will be blown over during the next big storm.
She waves to a lady selling coffee from a cart. She exchanges money for a cup. She doesn’t know that the lady became engaged that morning. She smiles at a child sitting on a man’s lap across the row from her. The child doesn’t smile back because he is fighting back tears. Feeling a bit offended, the girl looks away without knowing that the little boy’s dog had died only hours before.
She pulls out her camera as the train comes to a brief stop at a platform. She looks through her tiny lens and zooms in on a couple. They are clutching at one another in a seemingly loving embrace. The girl takes a photograph the moment. She has no idea that they are on their way to a funeral.
The girl on the train wrote snippets, and took pictures, and drew diagrams of all the things and people she saw on her trip. She had contained bits and pieces of lives within her little blue notebook. She thought she was a true observer of the world around her. She considered herself a recorder of facts. But, in the end, all she had was a little blue notebook filled with little white lies about the world she saw but didn’t understand.