Travel Journal #1

Musings from a Train Journey

The train felt unusually fast. The green pastures with flowers that lay like a yellow blanket on the other side of the window expanded my lungs and I inhaled deep. To travel from place to place, to be in the company of strange people who knew nothing of me, to venture out into the vast open feeling my heart racing was what I wanted during that journey.

Holding ‘La Terre Vain et autres poèmes’ an English-French translation of poems by Eliot, a goodbye gift from Béatrice, against the panorama of fields where real cows looked like wax statues and other sights that went past me, I open the first page of the book.

“Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats…”

“You”, one word that got me wondering. You were longitudes away. The drizzle was least expected. The man who I thought was napping opposite to me woke up. One look outside, a half-smile nod at me and he hurriedly went back into completing his pleasant midday dream I suppose.

The glass window was now cold. I leaned my head and watched the rainwater create linear patterns as it glided down. It reminded me of the lines that formed beneath your eyes whenever you smiled. I closed my eyes leaving behind the lavender fields devoid of its lilac hue into beginning my midday dream; of you set against the backdrop of the Mediterranean sunset.