Can’t Sleep.

I’ve been sitting in bed, staring at my computer, and the warm chocolate milk and mint chocolate Bailey’s is doing little to comfort my troubled mind, much less my troubled stomach.

All I keep thinking about…is the first time I ever heard a train.

We don’t get trains in Santa Monica, I’m not close enough to the Port of Los Angeles for that. I had to wait seventeen years, until I went to the Midwest for college.

I remember my first night in Iowa City, in my parents’ hotel room, before I moved into my dorm room. I was in one bed, they were in another. I was just drifting off through my nervousness about impending loneliness once I was moved in…

And I heard a low, sad moan, followed by a lower shuffling. A sharp whistle pierced me through everything I was…

I got out of bed and sat in the chair by the hotel window. From there, I could see the other new students and assorted boozehounds partying below, but I could not hear them. Just this odd, sad melody cutting through the air.

My mother raised her head sleepily, and I asked her what the noise was.

“My god, you really have never heard a train before, have you?” she asked, voice thick with exhaustion and disbelief. She laid her head back down and fell back to sleep.

I sat at the window and listened to this song, this ode to journey…listened until it faded out, a ghost of industry, off to some final destination.

I cried. I cried harder than I ever had in the seventeen years before, and I can’t explain why. From then on, the sound of a train always drove me to the nearest window to…feel something.

When I moved to New Mexico, to Santa Fe and Albuquerque, I was always near train-tracks. The sound, the mournful wail down the line…it always made me smile, tears brimming in my eyes, sitting by my window. It sang to me…told me there was a world out there, a world within reach. If this metal banshee could make it to some far away place, why couldn’t I? It was always something bigger than me, something so much bigger than me.

I moved back to Los Angeles last December. I haven’t heard a train in a year…I thought I’d reached the end, the Port, the last stop.

Tonight, in a half-asleep daze…I swear I heard a train in the distance. Faintly…singing…humming a song of glory and something so much more than me, so much farther away than my limits. I came out of the trance, and realized it was on some movie I had let run on my TV.

I…feel so indescribable now.

“Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance…everybody thinks it’s true.” — Paul Simon

*Finishes third drink and sighs*