A sudden stop

You awaken as the train comes to a halt. It takes a moment for your eyes to focus, peeling your face away from the window pane. You can see that outside the train that the urban landscape of Chicago is long long gone, replaced with rolling hills and little farmsteads of the midwestern countryside. Snow still hides in the hollows of the hills, but where the sun has melted the snow away on the hilltops there are clumps of grass poking up from the brown and unplowed earth. Checking your phone you see that it is late in the afternoon, still only a few hours into your journey home.

Melancholy hits you suddenly, like a wave. You sigh. Only now does it hit you where exactly you are going. Back home. Back to your childhood home. Back to your “hometown.” This place might as well have been on the far side of the moon for how long you have been living in the big city. A place that feels so small and strange to think back on after dealing with the comforting anonymity of the city for so long. It’s a place where people will know you and feel entitled to your business and time just because you grew up a block away from each other. A sort of suffocating familiarity that made you so happy to be leaving so many moons ago. And now you’re going back there, back to your hometown. Maybe for good. You feel your lips curl into a frown with that awful thought.

You put the painful memories of growing up in a poe-dunk city out in the middle of the prairie wastelands out of your mind, it will only make you more annoyed and upset with yourself at having to go back. Of failing to make it in the big city as you insisted to anyone back home who would listen or at least stick around within earshot of you while you talked incessantly about leaving while being such an annoying twerp of a teenager. Instead you think forwards to seeing your family again.

“Eh.” You grumble. That’s not a particularly happy thought either now is it. You go back to staring out the window. There’s a honk of a train horn and you watch as a dirty freight train crawls by on the opposite track. You start counting the rusted train cars as they rumble on past: one, two, three, four―

Four locomotives, 175 train cars, and what feels like an hour later the freight train’s last car snail crawls past your window. You sigh. You feel another thunk as your train lurches and starts to move again, picking up speed and passing through the rocks and rills of the countryside once more. That was a nice distraction, therapeutic to your anxious soul for as long as it lasted.