Trains in the Wood

The afternoon train held the same passengers it always does. They had been celebratory and raucous for the whole trip. Casual dresses, button-down shirts and ties and slim-fit dress pants. Talks of investments and schools for their kids, criticisms of European hotels and overrated restaurants. Spilled wine accompanied by caustic cheers and hard pats on the back. They were friends. They would take this ride again and again and it would always be celebrated. Their children either sat quietly on the leather seats, transfixed by glowing screens, or they stared out of the windows as the forest blew by, never quite being able to get a grasp of where they were.

I had friends aboard. We reminisced of old times at the beginning of the trip and I had enjoyed it. We talked about what we knew of the mountains—what we had known—and we bought rounds of beer for one another and it was good to see them with their loved ones in their arms. My parents sat in back, quietly with grandmother. I would come by and check on them when I could. But I enjoyed going from car to car and seeing what changed and so I did not spend time with them and they got used to my absence.

I fell in love on the train. Too many times. It was always like that. When I walked through the cars it was always easy to fall in love. There was the barista working at the café car, who bantered with ease and who I struggled to make eye contact with because I thought she would see all of the love inside of me and the sight would scare her away. I fell in love with the girl in the kira who was visiting from that make-believe land that I had once dreamed of. I sat and talked with her and she was very shy. I plunged into the black onyx of her eyes and imagined the kisses I’d give her on that porcelain skin. And there was also the girl that I dreamt about when I had fallen asleep in my chair. The girl who I hiked with in mountains much like the ones the train rumbled through, who I swam with naked in the frigid lakes and who I wrapped in my down coat aside a campfire that was a tiny glow below a resplendent night sky.

If one girl knew that I had fallen in love with the other she might think that I had not truly loved her. But I had. I still do. For love is not the fire ablaze; it is the scar that stays. The proud scar, from something penetrating through thick skin and leaving its mark forever. And so when I walked along and fell in love again, it was a building up and a weighing down, because love is often one-sided. And if it is not, it is hidden away or unrequited.

The train barreled on, but the world in the cars seemed steady. We felt large there in our car, the identities we bore expanding and colliding into one another, trying to find room. After the initial confusion of boarding, we found our cars and they found their cars with those like them. The beautiful cars with the beautiful people who effused compliments on each other’s clothes and jewelry and new noses. The deviants who looked sideways at each other and complained of the odor and felt at home in misunderstanding. The erudite and learned debated ideas beyond the point of their knowing, still grasping to the need to be right. And the insecure clutched onto one another and pointed fingers at the others, deriding all their abhorrent ways, inventing faults that no one else could see.

The chatter in all the cars vibrated through the train so much so that the rotating clamor of the wheels on the track could not be heard, nor the great gales creaking the timber outside, nor the heavy rainfall.  The people consumed full meals standing up and ordered more drinks, and passed crinkling chip bags and plastic juices to their children as they pushed them along to play amongst themselves. The chatter held steady but what was said, no one could grasp completely. All was important, all gave a measure of the speaker. It was the voice and the noise that mattered and so one conversation fell upon another like bodies fired upon and collapsing in a ditch.

But then the chatter quieted when the passengers realized the train was slowing. When it stopped, the cars all held a white silence. The passengers pressed their faces close to the windows, pushing their noses up to the glass and steaming them up as they looked out at the misty forest.

There was still a pitter-patter of rain and the clouds made the forest grey, though evening was not yet near. The children who had been staring from the windows were pleased. They could see the forest now. What a strange appeal it had. It was a place that they had read about in their books, but they had never seen up close and so still.

The parents began to worry and then one asked, What will we do if the train does not start up again? and murmurs spread and filled the train as they grabbed their children and held them close. The children felt the discomfort then and their fascination began to be replaced by a fear that connected them to their parents.

Outside, the quiet of the wood permeated everything. I opened the door, and the colddamp hit me. I stood on the entrance stairs, and all I could hear were drops falling from the wet pine boughs onto the fallen trunks and blankets of moss. The clouds overhead were thick and wet and seeped in through the canopy. A bluejay alighted on a cedar branch and preened itself, sending dew drops off of its wings. I stepped down from the metal stairs, onto the rough gravel of the tracks and finally stopped to watch the jay, my feet planted on the black humus of the forest floor. The cold enveloped me. I zipped up my jacket and put my warm hat on and slipped my hands into the big downy pockets.

I could almost swim in the mist. It held its own silent vibration, more benevolent than that of the train, familiar and filling. I closed my eyes, listening to that empty noise.

And then I felt the gears shift; I was not sure if the feeling came from the train or if it was something inside of me. There was a cheer from inside the cars and the train started to inch forward. I turned to face it, but I did not reach out to grab the banister for the stairs that would put me back on the car. I walked alongside of the train as it slowly moved forward on the track, its steel wheels making labored revolutions. There was still time to hop on before it picked up speed. Still, I followed it only perfunctorily. I knew that I was expected inside, where I had left my bags and where my friends and family were.

I walked along the outside and the barista waved from the window of the café car and I waved back. The masses were already getting back to their conversations behind her. She motioned for me to get on board and I smiled at her, but I stayed beside the train, walking in the forest just beside the tracks. Now the train was picking up speed. The great body had momentum. Her car now moved faster than I could walk. I let the car move away and she smiled again and waved and then I could not see her anymore.

I saw the girl in the kira sitting pensively next to a window in the next car that came by. I looked up at her and she smiled, but did not wave. She only stared at me, and I wondered if she wanted to tell me something, that secret that would give me courage perhaps. She was so beautiful that I wanted to run along the side of her car, but I could not will myself to do it—that would have changed everything. I stopped and I hoped for time to freeze and I hoped that the train did not exist, that the only things that could exist would be she and I and the forest. I wanted some sign from her to come aboard, or better yet a sign that she would join me there, outside. But she only watched as the train moved her away.

There was still time to climb aboard if I ran and grabbed hold. But it was not what I wanted. The forest grew more comfortable, even as the clouds descended and the mist melded into a drizzle that collected into dewdrops that covered my clothes and dotted the light hairs on my head and beard.

The train clanged along and the noise of the crowds grew again and I could hear the pullulating festivity, though it was muffled by the sound of the train and the fact that I was outside. In each car that rolled by the scenes were the same as when I had ridden along. The friends bantered and talked of the same commonalities and the same goals and the same struggles. An older man – no, he is my age, but he looks older – quickly glanced out and he saw me there watching the train and we exchanged glances. Then I knew that I am strange.

I was comfortable there in the forest, comfortable with my strangeness. His look, a questioning, wondering look, only increased my comfort because I knew that he saw me and didn’t understand. Though I had just stepped off the train, I had been this way for so long. I do not know any other way to be. I knew then that alone in the forest is where I felt safe and that it was there among the crowds and the children and the women I have fallen in love with I was afraid.

The man turned away and he did not appear to tell anyone on the train that I was outside. He forgot me. And soon all the cars moved passed one after another and I no longer followed alongside of the train. I stood in one place and watched each car continue past me, one after another, carrying all of those I had once been among, those who sat in the car with me and shared their stories and their food and their drinks; those who I loved.

The train disappeared from sight first and then the sound drifted into an abstraction that was overcome by that omnipresence of the forest, that vibration. And that was all I heard. And I was home again.