Talk Soon

I know that the Amtrak Northeast Regional train takes forty-two minutes to get from Washington Union Station to Baltimore Penn Station without delays. I know this, and cannot forget. 

The seat shrieks as I recline to avoid the sun beating through the window to my left. Maryland’s green chorus blurs by, aching from spring into early summer. I know this ensemble in all seasons of desiccation, rebirth, song, and release; know it from aisle and window, northbound and south; know it like I know that this used to be your favorite shirt to steal, and that the Northeast Regional tops out at 125 mph but you’ve been still for a month as of today; know and cannot forget.

Of course delays come like rain: inevitable; familiar as a shrug. The Northeast Corridor has grown so tangled that one fuck-up begets a dozen, rippling down the spine of the eastern coast. Track repairs are nightmare operations and thus infrequent, and I know that the rattling underfoot corresponds with the Seabrook station on the MARC commuter line passing nearby.

Laptops sprout from tray tables I can see from my spot midway down the car. The dull mutter of conversation rises into the air like a forgetful gas. Unusually empty for a Sunday afternoon, when visitors typically stream back north to their respective dens in the boggling Northeastern Megalopolis after a few days in the nation’s capital, pleasantly glutted on museums and monuments. 

No one in the aisle seat beside me, where you preferred. You liked to stick one leg into the aisle and hear your knee pop after a crew member passed to check tickets, always and only at that point in the trip, a tic whose origin we both eventually forgot. We used to keep read receipts on—easier to coordinate, travel and otherwise—and my last text to you still sits unread: Talk soon. 

Amtrak’s northbound route is one of gradating sparseness. It moves from D.C. 's marble clamor into ambling Maryland suburbs, then woods and marshes, and eventually the grimy bustle of your Baltimore. The path beats a pleasant rhythm, negotiating the ebbing land like a conversation, a give and take. Today it nauseates me. The path has curdled in your absence, a vine shriveling in on itself in the heat, but here I sit, northbound again, to help your parents sort through what is left of your room.

From my recline I watch the world stream by. My hands lie limp in my lap. My phone sits in the pocket of my soot-black corduroys, engorged with unchecked notifications. Through the window comes a riot of green woods, then a winding creek, then a wide yellow plain of wheat, then—a yellow plain? No, next is supposed to be a copse of oak trees, then a block of generators festooned with warning signs of electric shock, humming into that stretch of the electric grid. The most open the scenery gets prior to BWI Airport is a single forgetful meadow. 

I ratchet my chair back up against its protest and glance around the car. Sunlight washes over the cheap navy leather seats. Laptops spit out their clacks; thumbs leaf through paperbacks. No one seems to have noticed a thing. In a blink, trees huddle up towards the rails once more, as scheduled. On track. 

Another few seconds of rattling, which means three ponds coming up in short succession. I wait, my face before the window—no ponds. A few more beats, breathless. Still, no water at all. Just woods begetting woods, a tedious argument of shaded intent. Maple and hickory where reeds and lilies should repose.

I stretch halfway out of my seat and crane around to check the back of the car. The typical assortment of families and solos and unremarkables speckle the seats. Private nonsense passes back and forth between couples and friends; a few sleeping heads loll. Normalcy abounds, in other words—then I notice Phil, my boss’ boss, absorbed in his phone two seats back. Except: Phil is traveling abroad this week. I RSVPed to his OOO on Friday morning.

“Phil?” I ask, too loudly, causing several heads to turn. He glances up from his phone with incomprehension. The man looks nothing like Phil at all. Too skinny by thirty pounds at least; a completely different shade of hair. 

“Who?” he asks.

While I’m busy gaping at him, trying to blink off the spell of false familiarity, the woods behind him break open onto a coastline. Marshes roll away from the tracks towards a lazy hugeness of water stretching to the horizon, sunlight breaking upon endless blues. Except, I know that this track is thirty miles at least from narrow Baltimore Bay, two hundred more over Delaware for a first glance of the Atlantic. I whip back to my window in time to see the marshes blink out, back into a wall of trees. 

It’s too much. Ignoring not-Phil and the passengers, all seemingly blind to the baffling scenery, I lurch out of my seat and stumble up the aisle towards the restroom, grappling with the overhead bins to stop myself from tipping over. The unbroken woods hug us on either side like a straightjacket.

The grimy metal sliding doors boom shut. I double-check that the latch has caught.  Grasp the sink in the piss-stained stall. The room sways and bumps in time with the old rails chattering underfoot. “You are in Maryland, riding the Amtrak Northeast Regional en route to Baltimore,” I inform the mirror. “It says so on your ticket. The kind you’ve bought a hundred times before.” 

The reflection appears no more convinced than I do. We meet one another's' gaze in silence. Our stares cradle a blind emptiness, the echo of an echo of something heavy and important dropped from a very tall height. Bags haven’t left my eyes since the afternoon I told you I was too busy catching up on work to meet you at Union Station and could you just metro over and walk to my place from the nearest stop. Not since Talk soon sent, and I noticed thirty minutes later that you should’ve arrived twenty minutes ago, and that sirens were descending on the intersection down the road. 

I slap myself once, hard, watch the blood rise to my cheek, and slam open the latch. The OCCUPIED sign blinks off as I wrench back the door and step into the aisle, where I find my mother sitting in the first row, watching the woods iterate. 

Whatever wordless sound emerges from me in that moment causes her to turn, and a stranger’s kindly eyes meet mine. “Everything alright?” she says through a thick midwest accent. My mother is back in Austin, likely at the farmer’s market at this time on a Sunday. I haven’t replied to any of her last three increasingly breathless voicemails. Like all Texans, she prefers to drive. Can’t stand public transit. I tear myself away from this perfect stranger, knocking several elbows jutting from armrests in my rush down the aisle.

I collapse into my seat and wait for the throbbing gray light crowding the edge of my vision to subside. Then I look around.

A jumble of red, alien rocks tumbles away from my window, the sort I’d first seen on a road trip through Utah. The train is tracing the lip of a massive canyon. Mean shrubs and stunted excuses for trees creep downhill. Specks of vultures circle over a yawning void, awaiting decay, as laptops continue to clack away and the idiot babble of horribly normal conversation fumigates the air and no one—not the midwest grandma up front or the not-Phil behind me or the fucking conductor, that’s for sure—does a thing about the blinding impossibility that has reared up into our Sunday afternoon and swallowed this train like a hiccup.

I wrench my eyes shut and try to breathe. Years ago, my mother attempted to teach me square breathing. Add it to the list of things she was right about that I declined to learn. True, kind lessons I was too full of an endless future to hear, pebbles I trod upon on a path arching ceaselessly upwards. Until it didn’t. Right now, I can’t seem to remember how many beats I’m supposed to hold on the top of the square. Shapes have jumbled, no physics will hold. I think I’m hyperventilating. 

No. I am northbound on the Amtrak Northeast Regional, somewhere in south-central Maryland by now. This I know. It is early summer and chanting greens cover the land. This I know. It takes this locomotive forty-two minutes to get from Washington Union Station to Baltimore Penn Station and we’ve ridden no more than thirty. This I know, and cannot forget. “Forty-two,” I mouth silently. “Northeast Regional. Maryland.”

I don’t know how much time passes like this, going again and again over the known, but when I open my eyes you are sitting in your seat, looking past me towards the canyon.

“I always loved this stretch,” you say.

You are wearing the last thing I’d seen you in: teal cargo pants, a short-cropped t-shirt bearing a rat smoking cigarettes. Tattoos giggle up your exposed left arm, half of them received with me sitting beside you. The bangs you’d dyed that spring frame your face with faded blues. 

The rest of the seats, the overhead lights, the no smoking signs have dropped away. 

“The guy ran the red. He was shitfaced,” you say. 

“I should have met you,” I say. “I could’ve walked you back. I could’ve done something. The client I was working late on dropped us the next week.”

“I’ve crossed that intersection a thousand times. I know the way to your apartment as well as you,” you reply. “He never even braked. All you would’ve done is join me.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. You might not believe me yet, but I really do.” 

You turn and meet my gaze for the first time. Same pair of almond-brown pools above your pierced nose, same look of laughter tucked into them that meant you knew something I didn’t. I know it well. 

“Please believe this: I love you. Always. I don’t regret a thing. And my parents are lucky to have you now.”

The windows, the rest of the car, the lost world outside blinks into nothingness. “I can’t do this without you,” I choke.

You smile then, as if everything were on track. “You can. Believe me, I know you can.”

The overhead speakers burst to life and a garbled voice breaks into the cabin: Ladies and gentlemen, now approaching Baltimore Penn Station. Baltimore Penn Station, next station stop. All doors will open. 

The sun-drunk car gasps back into being. Laptops snap shut as legs stretch into the aisle and I stare through your empty seat across to the far window. The trees thrum, then thin, then vanish. The rooftops of your city begin. This was your favorite part.