The Last Train

Aug. 10, 2010

I only have keys to an apartment in Providence now. For some reason, I feel like don’t live anywhere at the present. For some reason turning in my keys at PSU was the hardest thing to do. Somewhere in my mind I feel that there is a saying about keys and how many you keep on a key ring. I only have two now.

It is odd to start over from nothing to have a whole life and then in the course of a few short months, god, not even really, in the course of month, you have the life of an entirely different person. I’m on the train now. This will probably be the last time I am on this train. I overhear a conversation next to me; a twelve year old girl and her mother are talking about chickens. Rhode Island Reds are the biggest they say. Ironic.

I have always wondered if odd little occurrences in the universe are there or if they materialize serendipitously as the world changes around you. I suppose, really, it doesn’t matter. Only suddenly in a faraway place, or a crowded restaurant, someone calls out the name of a very close friend and in a kind of Proustian moment you are whisked away to a different time and place. You look up and wish you could be somewhere else, somewhere that doesn’t exist anymore and is lost in time.

But I’m moving forward now. I cross a bridge. The sun is setting behind me. I admire the mountains that I will soon be trading for the Atlantic. There is too much emotion to contain. Wondering who I will see again and who will fade into memory. The sun is low now, the landscape glowing with low yellow sun that reminds me of August in my childhood. Sunlight that always signaled the end of summer and the beginning of autumn, and somehow made me sad because it was the end of a season, haunting me with the kind of melancholy that fills up Sunday afternoon.

Two young people in the seat behind me talk about traveling to different cities. The young man has a three day beard, the girl has green dyed hair that is fading. The man says that he has lived in a kind of communal situation for the past two years, and the two days he has been alone has felt like two months. He explains how he hates being lonely. Most people don’t like to be lonely. For the first time really ever, I’m actually worried about my solitude. I know from traveling the intense solitude that overwhelms me is passing, I learn from it and it silently slips into my blood and becomes me when I come home. But what happens when you have no home to return to? What happens when the adventure is a one way ticket to a very different place? I suppose one must trust it. What else is there to do?

The young man and woman are still chatting about languages. She sings a prayer in Portuguese. He says how pretty it is. They continue on like this. The old woman sitting next to me is eating a cup of rammen soup. When she is finished, she leaves the paper Amtrak napkin draped over one knee. I crane my neck to see the Gorge behind me, and sneeze because of the sun. “Bless, you,” she says.

The light is getting low now. The trees are getting sparse. I am almost home now. Ah, if only that were true. I have to home right now other than where I might leave my suitcase for the night. It seem I am often finding myself on the train these days, somewhere caught in transition. A difficult place according to Rilke because you cannot stay there. Ah, Rilke, then why does it so often seem the only constant?