Station

“Humans have this capacity to love, to leave, to love anew. But we are not merely stations for the trains of other lives. We can stay. We can insist upon something that just might last.” The station on this spring morning is vacant, quiet, dappled with sun whose rays have begun to erase the memories of last night’s rain. I cannot seem to recall the train that brought me to this platform, at the very outskirts of my mind. Here, everything is hushed. Where might the next train lead? Some trains at this station lead to sunlit plains, others to lonely lighthouses at the edge of the world. Some lead to your heart, some to mine, some go round in circles and never, never arrive. There is a train coming. An overnight train to a lost city where dreamers dwell and dread waking. There is a train leaving; I think I see you in the window. I wave to you, beckon you so you might come back onto the platform before the train departs, but your gaze is fixed on some distant light, some landscape invisible to my eyes. Yet I think I have been to that land before, that imaginary station where promises scatter in the morning wind. That is the land where nothing lasts, where every path is a path for endless wandering. But, my love, I want to tell you as the train begins to pull away, you do not have to wander, you do not even have to search; everything you might have loved is right here.

A Wish to End All Wishes

I used to wish, used to pray, for things to last. Sometimes, I admit, I still do. I used to dream, used to believe, that some things last. I must admit, indeed I must, that I no longer believe that. But I am wrong, and I am scared, and my fear deludes me to make one wrong turn after another in the darkest corners of my mind’s endless maze, where no lamps are lit, where no fireflies glow. I turn and I turn and I stumble, fall, land on sweet moss kissed with dew; I am too tired to keep turning. In the starless sky of my weary mind, the moon rises alone. She tells me to stop wishing, that there are no stars to wish upon, not tonight, not now, perhaps not ever again. She tells me that stars were not made for wishes, that they were made only to light our way when we are lost. She tells me that love needs no wishes, that if we recourse to wishes, then what we have is not love. I listen. I weep. Crickets chirp like a thousand mothers seeking to stop my tears. The moon is still. Her impassive face watches over me. “I w-w-wish,” I whisper nonetheless, to whichever gods listen to lovers and children who have lost their way, “that I would never have to wish again.”

Change

Places change, people change; places are but faces of a larger scale. I once read that the heart changes slowly, ever so slowly, to spare us the pain of recognizing its change. So when we fall out of love, we fall painlessly, far more painlessly than when we fall in love. With a place, with a face, we fall in and out of love, just as we slip in and out of the chambers of our dreams, wondering which room hides the secret door to happiness. But when places change, when people change, why do I catch sight of a little window of winter sky just above my heart, why do I feel a winter chill stealing its way past half-open shutters? When places change, when people change, do we really know who is changing? Is it me? Is it you? The winter frost offers quiet answers as my heart begins to shiver from the cold. It is me, it is you. We never set foot in the same place twice. A place never encounters the same me twice. And you, do I ever encounter the same you? We change, have changed, will change again. But I really do wish that places and faces, every me, every you, could sometimes stay the same.