For CF, who asked, and unfortunately didn't give me a prompt and resulted in my rambling all across the page.
It's amazing, someone once told me, how far you have to run just to find yourself.
Because it's a Red Queen's Race, really. It's not that you're never where you are, but what you're looking for isn't who you are, it's who you want to be, and you find yourself when is and could be intersect.
That's why the sounds of the train whistle and the ship's foghorn in the night have always been the loneliest and most compelling sounds in the world, calling you out from where you are with the promise of where you might yet go.
Of course, that doesn't guarantee that you have any idea what you're doing.
I look out the window as the train crosses the border, seeing the flat landscape give way to rolling hills in the silver moonlight, red taillights of long haul truckers disappearing behind a ridgeline to the east, each one a mayfly life working deep into the night.
I close my eyes and lean back in the seat as the train finishes the crossing and starts to pick up speed, inertia tugging my inner ear out of alignment.
It's not going to go away if you ignore it, mate.
Sure enough, when I open my eyes, the letter is still there.
It takes about a dozen years to learn anything to a level where you don't look like an idiot. So you spend the first dozen years learning how to be a human, and the next dozen years learning how to do... whatever it is you think you'll be happy doing. And at the end of that double dozen you think you know what you want to do with the rest of your life.
And you settle down and wear out a rut from home to office and back again, and you think hey, this is it, this is my life, this is what I'm going to do from now on.
You're wasting your life, because a human is traditionally allotted fourscore and twenty years, and you've barely scratched a quarter of it before you decided that this is all you need.
Some people realise this at the back of their minds. You recognise them easily; they're the ones getting drunk down at the bar every Friday night, seeking release from the world that is. Some people deny it until they hit fifty, at which point they discard their entire life and buy a red Ferrari to chase the life that they think they should have had.
Most put it away, folding up the shining and glittering future they expected and keeping it pressed under glass, beside all the memories of the world that once was as a dream of a world that never was.
And some of us get a letter or email or phone call from a past that we never expect to see again, and if that message boomerangs out of the past a moment where we have nothing to hold us to the present...
The next thing you know, you're on a train to a village that you've never seen and never heard of, an emergency overnight bag shoved in the rack over your head and a phrasebook stuffed into your pocket along with your passport and traveller's cheques.
I don't read the letter for the hundredth time; don't even bother to remove it from the envelope.
The name on the flap is all I need to see.
Vasilieva
I fold the envelope up and thrust it back into my coat.
Loading comments...