I used to imagine that it was a ghost train. It would emerge from the night, a dark shape barreling without destination over the slick rails. It would appear unsummoned, carrying nameless travelers on their shadowy missions or maybe only the empty, vacant shells of everything that had come before it.
From my childhood bedroom, the whistle rose like a wolf’s howl against the chattering crickets, lingering like the fog that I was certain surrounded it. To me, it was a perfect symbol for my restless heart, and it filled me with the wonder of Someplace Else. It became my banshee, she who washed the clothes of my past away in a stream that ran unnoticed under the peckish moon. It was my first myth.
Tonight, that ghost train has rumbled again from the mists. But this time, I have become one of its passengers.
I await departure, laying my suitcases down gently on the platform. My friends have arrived to bid me adieu. All that should be said is being said, embraces are had, hidden truths spoken. At times, it feels a traveling funeral has sprung up around me as the well wishers grapple to claim their place in the line of last respects.
As voyages go, this one seems more in line with “A Night at the Opera” than “It Happened One Night”. I am Groucho, busily trying to squeeze a cargo bay full of luggage into a small stateroom, while an endless stream of people file in on their own separate, yet connected missions. It’s only after the stateroom door is opened that I will realize the extra hard-boiled eggs never showed up.
Soon, I will stare at the empty stateroom. I will watch the tracks beat out under my metal feet in the tranced rhythm and I will give in to its call.
My life is full of many trains such as this one, phantom engines that transport me from place to place, each one a piece of the one that will finally take me home. All the people that filled my little compartments will go on to their own connections, and I will look back all too briefly as they wave behind them.
The whistle has just blown for the last time tonight. I hear it over the faint warning of thunder on the horizon.
It’s time to go.