Personal essay: On trains
Audra Nemirow/The Hofstra Chronicle
When I look back on this time, I will think of myself in the third person, tenderly. “She was the girl on the train, always in motion,” I will think at some calm moment in the near future. Yes, there is a future, I must remind myself.
On trains, there is always a future. The train will arrive at Penn Station at blank time; it is certain. Life can be planned with mathematical precision. Everything can have a beautiful, predictable tempo. When I take a train, I become part of that strict tempo. I lose the desire to travel without a plan. I find that I hate having to kill time, and so I become very efficient. The lady becomes the train.
Trains are time-bound, like fate. They make me believe in destiny, that I have a destiny; they remind me that all through high school, I could hear train whistles from my childhood bedroom, perhaps to warn me about my immutable future. Maybe I was always supposed to be here.
When I arrive at the train station, which is perpetually under construction, I always walk to the farthest point on the train platform and think of Anna Karenina, her figure obscured by steam. I think about how she could not escape her fate, which was inseparable from the relentless advance of the train. But this thought is a touch of melodrama. I am aware of how ridiculous I am, how excessive. Only, I am afraid of ending up like her, with a destiny that is so definitive, with a destiny that puts an end to everything. As much as it scares me, I do, in fact, like the idea of tomorrow.
But let’s not think about endings. Let’s think about beginnings instead. I remember the first time I took a train by myself. It was oddly exhilarating, like the first taste of freedom. I sat backwards so that the train’s destination was behind me, so that places receded instead of appearing. And I was terribly aware of my surroundings, desperate to get off at the right stop. I couldn’t relax. But later, as the train trips increased in frequency, they all started to blur together, and I stopped remembering them. Maybe I would remember the wonderful instances of sitting on a double decker train, but that was it. I remember the destinations too, but I remember them as entirely separate from the train rides, as though I simply appeared in the city, growing out of the cracks in the pavement like a flower.
I’d like to take a long train ride all the way to the end of the line. Or, even better, a train going nowhere. And maybe one day, it will turn out that time was a false religion all along. There will only be the present tense, no past, no future. If I eliminate the past and future tenses, if I eliminate language, then I do not exist at all except in a gorgeous blur. And that day, the train will follow no timetables, the train will never stop, just continue with its beautiful tempo of wheels. Into infinity …
