Berlin to Prague

I arrive at the platform. Early always.  Frantically search my bag –at the train platform, taking out item after item, convinced I’ve forgotten something, left it behind at the hostel in Berlin: something important–my money belt; my chargers; my phone; my favorite blouse hanging over some nonexistent balcony somewhere; a half-read book, the end forever unknown; details of my past that are important to remember to get to where I am going.  Somehow, despite my belongings spread out on the gray concrete, I wind up where I am supposed to be, carefully intact, waiting for what might come next.

Around me, people are lost in their electronic worlds; I am not there.  The journey scares me.  I’m frenetic, tumbling everywhere.  Arriving is less frightening than leaving: you stand still, observing.

The people around me are looking for something: coins, directions, whatever it might take to get there; a plaintive voice beside me asks (in some accent or another): “Do you speak English?  Can you help me find where I am going?  This place is too big, too confusing.”  I offer nothing, holding onto my belongings, arms aching, praying that whatever I might need will be there when I arrive.

I succumb to the temptation of the electronic world, beckoning, cutting me off from what’s right in front of me.  I get lost in the solace of home, my laptop beckoning as it does every morning looking at empty houses, homes for sale in my neighborhood, comparing what I have to whatever might be out there.

Years ago, with Sam, we arrived in this city before dawn; it was dark and bleak, and I choked on my coffee, what was always left unsaid.  We were disheveled and unwashed.  The city rushed; we never stayed in one place, just walked from train station to city streets; I felt unmoored, stumbling alongside Sam, my body mirroring the cold, the damp, the day.  I followed along, wherever he wanted me to be.

He disappeared from my life to reappear years later, the same and not the same.  A 62-year-old man with thinning hair and busty blond girlfriends; someone I never was and could never be.  I have disappeared.  At 56, I fade, am nothing,  light diffused, blurring everything.  I try to hold on to what might be.

The train on the next track snakes away.  I don’t know if I am moving or standing still.  The doors close seconds after it pulls into the station, no time for hesitation: Get on or be left behind, standing on the platform, bags in hand, arms aching.

An old lady pushes a walker to the bench where I am sitting, somehow making her way.  I give her my seat, and she thanks me.  Her accent mirrors my own.  She has oxygen tubes in her nose, and tells me her story.  Her children are grown–adventurers like she is far from her small town in Texas only miles from the Mexican border.  How did she end up here beside me? waiting for the train to take us to wherever it is we are meant to be.  When we reach our destination, I will abandon her on the platform.  I’m gone.  Something disappeared when I looked the other way.

Tall skinny trees zoom past out the window; quaint houses with pretty-colored rooftops.  I want to capture it, but the moment I reach for my camera it is gone.  Pathways cut between the trees, dirt roads where someone wandered.  The train lulls, the beauty of the moment right here.  A sign.  Of what I am uncertain.

You wake up to yourself.  You fall into it, like a murky pond that somehow reflects back all you are meant to be.

I pick up my camera; what was here a moment ago is gone, like the boy with the balloon at the train station: it popped making us all jump: what could it be?