Like trains passing in the night

but, I think, still worth the ride

Author’s note: This week I wasn’t able to finish the piece on the interstellar medium I’d been planning, so instead I thought I’d share a short excerpt from my journal, lightly edited, on control.

Sunset on the Brown Line.

There’s a section of the Chicago L, between Armitage and Belmont, where the Red Line and Brown Line run on parallel tracks, and every now and then the timing will work out that they are running side by side, going almost identical speeds. It’s always a bit of a strange experience sitting on a train that is getting passed by another. You look through the window and see people with just the slightest smudge, an effect of two panes of dirty, reflective glass, I suppose. It’s like a freeze frame from a silent film: people standing, sitting, waiting. Passing time. Some people hold the overhead rail or hanging loop, others lounge against the door. Most look down, but a few look up, and you see their faces — each of us in contained our respective tubes of metal and glass.

Sometimes, if your head is up, there’s a moment of contact: a little nod with the exhausted guy leaning back on the glass by the door; or that moment of excitement: is that girl is a friend of yours? She looks like someone you know, but she doesn’t turn, so you can’t be sure; and then the moment passes, the train speed changes and we pull apart.

I think I assume life is more stable than it is. Like the wonderful friends I have now — it will stay like this, yes? Or my family — they won’t move, won’t age, won’t change, will they? We’ll be able to visit Grandpa another time, right? Even when things are displaced, I somehow expect a return to normalcy. After the surgery things will be back to normal. After the deadline I’ll have more time to rest.

But life keeps steamrolling forward. Sometimes all I can do is look through the glass as things pull apart. Sometimes, you barrel on, and I stay here. And other times I run on ahead, and you fall back. This week a community I’m a part of experience a sudden separation from one of their leaders, someone you just expected to always be there. Also this week we had two middle school kids suddenly displaced from their home living with us, and then just as suddenly, it felt, they were gone, to a Ronald McDonald house in Connecticut. It felt like a movie, what control do you have?

Not eight hours after the kids left my brother and sister-in-law visited, briefly, from out of state, and then returned home. And my dad called to tell me he won’t be seeking re-election. I just learned two of my friends are dating now. Another just bought a house. Another will be moving away.

I feel the tracks shaking under my feet. So many people come and gone, like flowers cut for a centerpiece. Like a delicious fulfilling feast: experienced, and then over, digested. Not forgotten, but you must eat again.