thoughts from the train pt. 1

Feeling relatively lucid today. I say this confidently and still manage to wonder what it means. For example, putting on my black boots of three years or so is just that—putting on the pair of boots for whom my affection has waxed and waned but has emerged from the tunnel of love in distilled simplicity; “I like those boots. I wear them most days.” The love is ongoing and flat.

But lucidity, what is it exactly? When words or phrases fall down easily, thickly, and plainly is the simple answer. But where do we locate its exigency? Locate it in a jolting between places, sounds, and sensory experiences; locate it with an open satisfaction with previous days’ expenditures rewarded with sensations of the distilled simple. The distilled simple, might I add, could be the greatest gift of all. 

I am thinking of all this because I am greeted by an unoriginal hometown, which usually puts pressure on my major joints—knees, elbows, ankles. But with the falling sounds of the distilled simple, I can stave off the emotional body ache of a repetitive location.

I can even watch it from a train window, which excludes me from being confidently placed within the soreness of town but rather rolled up in its immaterial biforcator, its hard-up and sweet body of passage. There is a clear observer and observee formulated by the window pane, separated by its distinctly hard matter. It’s separateness is even corroborated by several conductor witnesses whose bodies and minds are affected by the incorporal experience of occupying a train car for eight to ten hours a day. They are impartial witnesses of soul transference. 

note: hair up is occasionally a sign of spiritual recession. One conductor has exited the train with a high bun and two backpacks slung around each shoulder. When she gets to her car, she will let her hair down and unzip the contents of her bags to find her heavy soul distilled into a drinkable form. She’ll gulp it down, embody herself, and before she puts the key in the ignition, she’ll take a second to appreciate the comfort of a heavy soul once again. Not just comfort, but gratitude, because once she thought the lightness of an absent soul in a day’s conductor work was a distilled kind of simple, but now she knows it’s just probably a distilled kind of pain. The heavy soul, she has found, is far more preferable.