Starting Again

Everything starts somewhere. This morning, for example, began with faint tendrils of mist dancing atop the lake and a young buck, antlers unbloomed, watching me from the forest.

But our story begins in a small town that had captured my heart. A place where molehills were mountains and mountains were myths. A place where so many dreams had come to rest and where just as many more were killed unborn. Where the sun lounged itself in the sky, lashing down at the backs-of-necks below, and where the towering grass stretched farer than the eye could see.

And our story begins in an old house. Three rooms each a dull brown. A porch. A wooden rocking chair deep in creaking conversation with the wind. The house sat empty save for myself. A few year-like moments ago, someone had been there, but she left for the last time and with her, hidden in that leather briefcase, she had taken a chunk of my heart.

Looking back, I’m glad she left. If Elise had stayed, I might have as well.

And our story begins on a train. A hulking metal creature, bellowing torrents steams, racing the sun to the western horizon. From my window in the passenger car, I watched the land fly by, trying to remember every detail. And sometimes, when watching bored me, I would look down just long enough to forget where the train was going. After all, the red carpet here was the same in any train headed back east.

Leaving home had been an epiphanic idea. The kind that should have arrived on the stroke midnight and left before morning.

“Coffee?” A serving woman, heavyset and clad in stained white linin, wheeled a steaming cart past me.

“Coffee?” she repeated only a little louder, careful not to wake anyone up.

“No thank you.” I replied, my voice cracking a little. It was still early in the morning, and while most of the passengers slept, I wrote. The ballpoint pen danced along the pages of my journal, occasionally stopping, crossing something off. A woman slept next to me. Brown hair and eyes, her fur coat moved slightly as she breathed, and a golden watch was clasped around her wrist. Lilac, she had told me her name when we boarded the night before.

I wrote her a story in my journal. Her father had been a rum smuggler who’d made his fortune during prohibition. And her mother an unpopular actress. And why was she alone on a train headed west? I didn’t know. Coming up with stories was hard. I scratched the lines from my journal and snapped the red book shut.

From the window, I watched as dawn became day and towering mountains became rolling hills. The soft gurgling of coffee pouring and the symphony of yawns growing louder as people stirred to life.

“Coffee?” The serving woman was back with her cart and I almost said no again before-

“Yes. That would be wonderful,” Lilac responded, wearily running a hand through her hair. She yawned, and the woman poured her a steaming cup.

“Don’t you want coffee?” She turned from the serving woman to me, brushing the sleep from her eyes.

“No,” I stuttered, “I’m already awake.” I opened my journal but didn’t write anything.

“So, Andrew, you never told me, what brings you out west?” she asked, thumbing a lock of hair from her face and sipping at her coffee.  

“I…Well… I’m going to teach.” And that was the simplest truth however untrue. With a few hastily written letters I had gotten a teaching job lined up, but of course, the job was not what had brought me here.

“Oh, that’s wonderful. I could never teach. Dealing with adults is hard enough. Children...” She smiled endearingly, placing the half-empty coffee cup back on the table in front of us.

“So, where’re you headed,” I asked, genuinely curious.

“The last stop I’m afraid, California. I’ve been working on Broadway for so long, I want to try acting in some of those moving pictures.” I was stunned. Broadway for so long. From appearances alone, I had pegged her in her twenties, yet speaking she seemed older- in her thirties or forties perhaps. As usual, none of my stories were half as interesting as the truth.

“What are you writing in there anyway?” She asked, and I snapped the notebook shut.

“Oh… just uh, stuff, notes, observations you know…”

“Huh, well” She looked at her watch, the black needle pointing to VII. “I should be going then.” And with that final remark she disappeared, carefully adjusting her fur coat. Gone before I could even say goodbye. Her coffee cup abandoned three-quarters empty.

I sighed, turning my eyes back to the window, watching as the sun coated this new world in a fresh paint of gold. She would be back, of course. But for now, it was only the window and I. The balance between fear and hope teetering back and forth in my head. Like a hundred dice shook all at once. I’d sworn of gambling back in college when I’d lost on horses. Now, though, the dice were rolling again. And I knew once the train stopped, for better or worse, they would settle.

I would see Lilac again before she disappeared, thirty-three times exactly. It was nice talking with people like her. People who just have that kind of something around them that draws you in and keeps you there, like a bear gnawing at bee’s nest full of honey. And every word we spoke felt real and powerful even if it wasn’t. I would miss my short conversations with Lilac, but I would miss them fondly and wonderfully, like the freedom of childhood or riding horses up and down the coast.

Our story begins in a rural train station, tiny and forgotten. A train in all its mechanical glory stopping midstride here in the middle of nowhere. Its iron mouths wrenched open by unseen hands, and angrily, the locomotive spat out a man. Lanky with dark hair and grey eyes, he looked as he felt, uncertain.

I stumbled from the train into the heat. Hot and sweaty. I could already imagine what it would feel like in the schoolhouse- children screaming and shouting, and me sitting there yelling along with them like an idiot, trying my best to give them an education they wouldn’t know how to use. And maybe my best wouldn’t be good enough? I may have had all the education to be a teacher, but a four year degree was no substitute for the experience that I so blatantly lacked. A part of me thought the students would end up the one’s teaching.

An old man passed me, walking to the train. His skin was rough and worn like the roots of a tree or the well-polished cane helping him along. He waited there for a long moment, resting his cane on the edge of the platform. Though he said nothing to me, I could see the sadness in his eyes, in his very soul. He needed the cane to live just as much as he needed it to walk.

He watched the train reverently, as if it had been sent to usher him to heaven, but he didn’t step forward.

“The trains going to leave,” I said, hoping he would hop on the train or at least back away from the platform.

“I know,” he responded, the faint outline of a dry tear on his face. “I do know.”

“I know,” he mumbled, turning and limping away.

The train started howling again, spewing a bright column of steam as it began to move forwards, but I could still here the man’s voice mumbling over and over,

“I know. I know. I know.”

And that was how I met Filo West or Crazy Filo, as the townsfolk later told me they called him. No one knew much about the fellow, except that he was old and strange. Rumor said he had a wife once and that she left him, heading west. And each time a train passed through town he would buy a ticket and each time he would just sit there watching the train leave. Eventually, of course, his money ran out, but he had kept coming to the tracks anyway.

“I know. I know. I know.” The train had disappeared into the distance now, and Filo’s mumbling had only grown more persistent.

I looked around, past the train tracks on the opposite side of the station, and sighed. This was why I was here; this place, largely untouched by the machinations of humanity, a place where one could simply be. Fields of wild grass and crops stretching to the horizon and back, and occasionally- only every couple miles or so- a one room house made with logs or clay.

And there was a town on the other side of the station, though calling it a town would be perhaps an overstatement. Though for me it was perfect: the scattering of petite buildings dressed in hand-me-down planks with tar paper hair and the occasional man or woman crossing the dirt road. My first thought leaving the station, was that I had stepped into a novel.

There wouldn’t be bandits here or Indian raids or pistol duels or brave sheriffs, would there? I gripped my small bag tightly even though it didn’t hold anything valuable: clothes, pictures, and books mostly. What little I had left; I did not wish to lose.

And so, with the summer sun lashing against my neck, I walked down the dusty street and smiled. The dice had stopped rolling.