The Train Station

In which I lose my absolute shit

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry I begged you for years to see more of you, and then wasn’t there when you finally showed me.

I’m sorry I couldn’t find anything left in me to hear you when our time was short.

I’m sorry for all of us. That you carried your sister’s photo around for decades, believing yourself to be orphaned. That she believed that bastard when he told her you were already gone. That we missed each other, over and over again, for years, and decades, and lifetimes. That all I have to give you now that you’re gone is my apologies to thin air and my forever-regrets.

I did my best. You knew that.

It wasn’t enough. You let it go.

I see you at the train station in my dreams and you never speak of it. You’re always soft-spoken, smiling. Playing with the children, the animals, with a lightness to your step that I always felt but rarely saw in the heaviness that marred so much of your mortal life.

I look for you night after night, but the train comes when it’s ready, and in the moments between I forget that one thing you were always good at, maybe too good at, was forgiveness.

I don’t want you to forgive me.

I was an adult. Wasn’t I?

Woman-child.

Adults are supposed to know what to do. Aren’t they?

None of us ever know what to do.

And I fucked it up. You gave me everything I asked for, a whole book of yourself, reaching for connection after a lifetime of my anger at your brokenness, and I simply ignored you.

But you meet me at the train station for the departed, and you’re the same as you ever were.

I wonder sometimes why you linger there. So much time has passed. You told me how you believed in past lives — how you remembered dying on the battle field, struck where an angry birth mark blotted your chest. Shouldn’t you have moved on to being someone else’s gentle child by now?

But there you stay at the station, waiting for me, year after year. How long will it take for you to know that I’m ok?

Are you?

I know now that the train isn’t for me. It’s for you. It comes and goes, and you stay behind, suspended in the gaps between my dreams. The ones I always told you were important. You were the only one who ever believed me. Like I believed you when you told me you remembered the bullet.

But when I meet you there, I can’t help but stomp around, wondering why I don’t understand the terminal map, dipping in and out of the corridors as you wait for me back at the platform. Stupid as ever, speed-walking past knowledge, like looking for the pencil I’m holding in my fucking hand.

I never asked you where the trains were going. Or why you were there. I never asked you what you were waiting for.

I begged you for answers for decades, sped-walk past them in a haze of bravado and bad parties, and never stopped until your heart did.

I’ll never get that time back. I’ll never get the conversations we could have had back. I’ll never forgive myself for assuming the luxury of time on a clock I didn’t wind.

I’d give anything to turn back those hands, haggling with the Fates to undo their work, bartering every word of my own fantastic stories, every second of fun and whimsy tucked between the years of struggle, every penny to my name. The Fates remain unmoved. We get one shot to do it right.

But next time I see you at the train station, I’ll tell you the one thing I wouldn’t take back.

I found her. And she has your story now, too. And although a part of me selfishly hopes you will, maybe I’ll finally gather the decency to tell you that you don’t have to wait for me at the train station anymore.

We’re gonna be ok.

If you insist on continuing to forgive this senseless world, then it could use more gentle children.