WAITING AS I WAIT
Standing in a one-track train station without a timetable, I wait for a train the ghosts say never comes but once a lifetime.
Of course, I ignore them—they are ghosts, after all, incorporeal beings always losing their shapes and everything contained in those shapes, while I am still alive and full of the confidence and surety of my rightness that only the living possess, packaged tightly within my solid form—keeping my eyes on the horizon I imagine the train will come from.
Time upon time a train arrives, coming from the opposite horizon, suddenly there as though it had always been there and my eyes had failed to see it, silent, vapor caressing its fading silver skin, stunted reflections showing in its carapace that do not seem to match any part of the station surrounding it. I go to board, but cannot, and am told without words being spoken—the knowledge suddenly appearing in my head, absent one moment, present the next—that only ghosts are allowed on this train, and I am not a ghost, not yet; this train and all the trains I have seen are not the train I am waiting for, but I do not know this, cannot know this, until I try to board them, and the unspoken words appear in my head, and so I try to board all of them, sure that this one—this very one!—will be the very one for me.
The ghosts cover their phantom mouths as they snigger, having found their prescribed seats. As one they whisper, 'Not yet, not yet', as the train pulls out and speeds to the horizon I have spent a lifetime searching, and I can hear them clearly, though the windows of the train are thick and remain unopen; I imagine I can see the air between us vibrating as their voices travel towards me even as the train pulls away.
Not yet. No, not yet. But life is not forever, not in any singular sense, which is the only sense that matters when one only has one life, and I will wait at this station, now turning my head from horizon to horizon—though I am reasonably confident that my train will come from the horizon I have long been watching—until ‘not yet’ becomes ‘now’, and a train appears that I am able to board, the seat awaiting me, and no one else, known to me as soon as I lay eyes upon it.
The End