untitled

(this story is being built a word, a phrase, a sentence, maybe even a whole paragraph at a time – very slowly. whether that makes it good or not remains to be seen. new entries might be dated or might not, i don’t know. that’s a major element – i don’t know. it might even acquire a title someday. i have no idea if anyone ever reads this, so maybe i post it only for my own, i suppose, ego. anyway, it is a new way for me to write, and i await to see what happens.)

“My father,” I said, “was a builder of boats.” And satisfied with my beginning, I sat back in my seat, and began again. The darkened train plunged on through the night. A fragment of a song came to me, one I maybe was only imaging, or maybe it was just that sort of song, “We know where we’re going, but we don’t know where we’ve been.” Funny I thought. I think I know where I’ve been, but I don’t know where I’m going. When I bought the tickets as the station, I had told the ticket agent to surprise me with the destination.

“My father built boats,” I began again. “Some ended up being adventurous sailboats, some ended up being life rafts. He says he never knew when he started one what it would end up being, that it was, in the end, up to the person he built it for to determine the nature and purpose of each boat. He just built them, you see. They created their own futures. Is that how you are, creating your own future, allowing the illusion to become something more?” I asked her, across the seat.

“I don’t understand,” she said, not understanding. Kate was the type who usually understood everything. “Did he ever make a boat for you?”

“No, he said he thought I should make my own boat. But I never had his feel for wood and tools, and all of my attempts ended up more like kindling than boats.”

How I came to talk about my father is a mystery. For, as I’ve already said, he was a boat man who, as long as I knew him, had no use for trains. “I have nothing against a train,” he was known to say when in his cups, “but they are a noisy, inefficient and inelegant means of transportation. Still,” he allowed, being a reasonable man, “there is likely no better was to cross distances devoid of navigable bodies of water.”

Sometimes it felt like I was traveling alone. Kate had fallen asleep, but I didn’t even know if she knew that she was traveling with me, or if she was just traveling. Not, I suppose, that it made any difference. And not knowing where I was going, I wondered if I knew who was traveling with whom. it was all about the travel.

11/4

and like waking up from a dark dream, the train burst from the long tunnel, our carriage filled in a flash with the golden light of sunset. kate did not wake, but i did, even though i didn’t know i had been asleep. sometimes it’s like that.

i didn’t know much about her. i’d only met her at the cafe in the train station, right before i bought the tickets. she was the kind of person one feels one has known for lifetimes, as many as there have been. i asked her where she was heading, what train she was waiting for. she said she didn’t know.

“neither do i, ” i answered. “would you like to come with me?”

she said yes, so i went to buy two tickets to somewhere. when i got back to the table, kate had bought us both coffees in tiny white porcelain cups. the first of many, i thought to myself.

Share this Post