Maybe it’s ‘cause they’re going somewhere, and I’m just standin’ still. Maybe it’s ‘cause the sound they make fills me with a thrill.
Maybe it’s just ‘cause I’ve listened to one too many songs. “Third boxcar, midnight train.” “And I found myself attached to this railroad track. But I’ll come back to you some day.” “Just a small town girl. Livin’ in a lonely world. She took the midnight train goin’ anywhere.”
I find myself having a love affair with railroad tracks. Not like how they do in Japan these days, where you marry your chair or a cardboard cut-out of Brad Pitt. Not like that; more in the way where I find myself there sometimes at 3am after a night of drinking. The way your fingers find your exes in your contact list and want to call them even though you’ve got nothing to say – that’s the sort of love affair I’m falling into. “Down around the corner. A half a mile from here. You see them old trains runnin’. And you watch them disappear.” My feet want something that my brain can’t seem to handle, and I wander up and down the slats, sometimes lying down and feeling the warmth of the last train come through.
Some folks say that’s just how life in a small town is. “Don’t look in the mirror when I wash my face, ’cause nothin’ ever changes.” Nothin’ ever changes. Some folks think melancholy grows in corn and wheat and barley, that we drink it down with our mother’s milk. There’s this song, this good one, and this line that goes “The waitress was sitting outside smoking in her car. She had that look of total fear in her eyes. And as we drove away from there she looked at me and she smiled.”
When did I become that waitress?
Sitting in her car, smoking and dreaming about the world those tracks lead down to, smiling at the people come passing through because that’s a face you’re never gonna see again, and there’s something painful and beautiful about that. A face you’re never gonna see again. It makes me think maybe I should start looking in the mirror. Maybe there’s something in my eyes today won’t be there tomorrow.
‘Cause “if they freed me from this prison, If that railroad train was mine. I bet I’d move it on a little farther down the line.” Cuz I’m in love with that there railroad track, and when I finally go I’m not coming back.
This image comes courtesy of Hayley Mechelle Bouchard. Her work can be found at Little Cat Photography, with more information about Hayley on Our Contributors page.