Tonight on the train platform I am waiting for the Queensbound E, my iPod playing quietly into my ears when a woman comes up to me, panic-stricken and wide-eyed and gesticulating wildly. She has that demented look about her, the look that betrays a tiredness so often seen in the city, one so often seen in the murkiest depths of winter when clouds obscure suns and days are still too short. Her dark coat is wrapped tight about a sturdy frame, and a massive shock of auburn curls spills down onto her shoulders. I reach for my earphones and gingerly pull them out.

"And the train, will it go there?" she says.

"Excuse me?" I am taken aback by the forwardness and urgency in her voice.

"The train, will it go to the station?"

"I'm sorry, the train?"

"Yes," she says, "the train. Will it take me to the station?"

"Which station?" I ask.

She looks at me and with one hand straining impatiently at her hip points the other with a complete and resolute determination. "The next one."

I think for a moment and look to where she is pointing into the tunnels, and then slowly turn back to peer into her eyes. They are a soft and beautiful brown.

"Yes," I say. "It will."

Her brows relax and her shoulders drop, and the tenseness that so consumed her seems to evaporate into the dank air.

"Thank you," she says quietly. "Thank you so much."

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We're back in the city after a long weekend away, exhausted and utterly spent from all the driving, from all the walking, from all the eating, from all the cold.

We started in southern Vermont, skiing Mount Snow on Friday in fifty-degree sunny and spring-like weather and then braving the rain and fog Saturday morning for a spur-of-the-moment road trip to Montreal. It was a little after 5pm somewhere just north of Burlington when the rain turned to snow and slush and all things dangerously winter, and we slowed to a crawl as we crossed the border, checking in to our little bed-and-breakfast somewhere a little before dinnertime.

We make the pilgrimage to Montreal every few years or so when the spirit moves us, the last time being some years ago. It always fascinates me driving across the border; everything seems so suddenly different, so foreign, so Canadian, and it surprises me how easy it is to simply drive there. We spent two nights there in Old Montreal, walking about the city during the day and hopping from bar to bar at night, ogling the pretty boys dancing, ogling the pretty boys gyrating their hips, ogling the pretty boys smiling and winking and doing their best to get a private audience with whichever of the wide-eyed patrons there is ready to head to the mysterious rooms at the back. We watched and giggled and laughed along and downed our overpriced Coronas.

It turned cold Saturday night, and not just normal winter cold but the kind of cold that chills you to the bone, the kind of cold that with a little wind turns easily into the negative double digits and which saps you of any energy you might have left after returning to your room at 4am reeking of smoke and beer. It seems to always be cold when we go to Montreal. "We bring the crazy weather," Greg told Georges, our host. Georges laughed and warned us to stay warm. We tried but failed as we barhopped into the freezing hours of night.

We're back in the city now, back after our trip. We're tired, we're exhausted, and we've had our fill of Montreal for the next couple of years. Play time over for now; it's time to get back to the real world. At least it's warmer here.

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The first time it wasn't too bad, just a wham-bam-thank-you-sir the Wednesday after Thanksgiving and I was out with little more than a minor out-of-body feeling. The second time was yesterday, and that was a little tougher.

I lay face down under the live x-rays, my back naked and feeling exceptionally vulnerable under the glaring white lights as the doctor, a poker-faced man with a Napoleon complex, stood on a stool not too high above me. To his right, a medical student busied himself making idle chat with me and swabbing solution after solution over my neck as I tried to relax. It began the same as the last time. "You'll feel a little pinch now," the doctor said, "and then a little sting." I felt the first needle being inserted at the base of my neck, and someone pushed it around until he was satisfied it was where it was supposed to be. "In cases like this," the doctor said in hushed tones, "you see here, you can get around this problem by doing this," and his voice trailed off as I tried thinking of other things.

I thought instead of the elderly Indian couple sitting beside me earlier in the crowded waiting room. They must have been in their seventies, the couple, and dressed in traditional garb, socked sandals and all. The tiny man with his navy blue pants and tan kurta, the even tinier woman with her gold rings and beautiful red sari vibrant against the dull white hospital walls. No one paid them any heed, and they bantered on unintelligibly, gently at first and growing more and more animated as time went on, interspersing melodic Hindi with a peppering of English words and phrases. Soon I was able to get the gist of their conversation.

"I am not causing a scene," the man said, looking down to his sandals and fingering the scrap of paper in his hands.

"You are causing a scene," his wife said. "If you want to cause a scene, you can go outside." And then they broke off in Hindi again. "And I never wanted to come here."

"Then seven years ago you should have said so."

"I should have stayed in India. I never wanted to come here." The woman glared at her husband, who sulked visibly as he shrank back into his seat.

"Your problem is that you can never make up your mind," he said, quietly. "You are always..." He finished off the rest of his sentence under his breath.

"I always make up my mind," she said. "I just made up my mind right now, and I never wanted to come here."

"Then I will buy a ticket for you and put you on a plane."

"Okay."

The pressure of the doctor's hand on the nape of my neck brought my thoughts back to present and I was suddenly aware of the strange cold liquid making its way slowly down to my chin. "There's going to be a bit of pressure now," the doctor said as I felt something unnervingly dull pressed against my neck. "Okay, there's going to be a bit more pressure now," he repeated, and I felt my neck being pushed down into the pillow by the second--and what I later learned was a rather large--needle being inserted into my spine. I'm glad I didn't ask to see the needle beforehand. "There's going to be a little bit more... pressure... now." He must have hit bone. It wasn't this difficult last time. "Okay, more now." And he pushed.

"I will put you on a plane and you will go back to India tomorrow."

The tiny couple seemed so strange, so out of place and yet so familiar in a city full of a thousand cultures.

"And I will go. And stop making a scene."

"I am not making a scene. And you are not making up your mind."

The conversation went on quietly and endlessly, and I pretended not to notice, but precious little could I do but follow along, so delightful it was in its circularity and pretend-privacy.

"And I will go on that plane."

"But you should have said so seven years ago."

"I never wanted to be here in the first place."

"And you can never make up your mind."

"Stop making a scene."

After what seemed like hours but what was really just a few seconds, the doctor stopped pushing. The anesthetic had deadened any pain I might have felt, and I tried not to think of the dull pulling and prodding at the periphery of my senses.

"And now you may feel a funny sensation down your arms."

The muscle on the left side of my chest spasmed violently and what felt like warm liquid rushed through both arms as the steroid concoction made its way into my spine.

"That's it," the doctor said. "Everything went well." And I felt the tug of what must have been the needle in my skin. "A bit tougher than last time, but good."

The student walked me out of the operating room, still chatting away and patting me on the back as though congratulating a prizewinning horse. The nurse took my blood pressure and sent me off to the dressing room. "The last patient," the nurse said, "his blood pressure went all the way up and I had to sit him down for a good while, but you, you're good to go." So I went.

Today I woke up with little to show from yesterday's procedure but two tiny holes in the back of my neck that Greg said looks like a spider's bite, and a little soreness from the puncture wounds. I'm hoping and hoping the pain will finally go away. And the elderly couple from yesterday, I wonder what happened to them. I wonder if she's on a plane somewhere across the darkened oceans right now, and he's rocking in his favourite chair at home, each stubbornly thinking good riddance to the pains in their necks and each already terribly missing the other.

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