The Trains

Tonight before she shuts her eyes and goes to sleep, she will leave the window of her bedroom open as she does every night, so as to listen to the passing of the trains. Neither the smoke from the cigarettes of her neighbours, nor the noise of the sirens that make their way from the main road and into her lap could ever compare to the sound of the trains. Their lurch, the sound of metal upon metal, so distant and yet so suffusing… carrying people to the very ends of the world. She can see hills in the distance from her window, but she can never reach them. They disappear into everything once she steps outside: they can only ever exist when she stands here. It is here the trains pass; it is here her stomach turns to be.

She imagines that the trains take her somewhere else, somewhere over lakes of serene beauty- still, and purple. Through silent fields of such a pervading calm, darkly green and baleful, but beautiful and endless. The trains whistle past the tall evergreens which dance beneath the night sky… laced with stars that seem so close that they might hold hands, though never have they met. They stand still and lonely; the trees dance with silent fervour.

She imagines that the trains will take her to places she has seen, and places she has not. Towards cities to be made vulnerable and again strong, and to the countryside where she would dissolve beneath the snowflakes and into the cold, cold night. To live forever in the streams and rivers, giving her life unto life. She would ride the trains to wherever they would take her, to somewhere else, beyond the walls of her mind.

But still tonight she lies in her bed, her belly starved of quiet and a cooling of her blood. She never leaves, but the knowledge that the trains exist upon the hills beyond her window leads her to the very edge of her own consciousness… and lets her fall, slowly, into the clouds of synthesis and toxin beneath. At once she is asleep, belonging now to the state of something, until again she wakes once more. The cool night air finds its path through her window, and into her room, and rests upon her skin. But nothing compares to the sounds of the trains.