The Nelligan Review

...hiss open and the morning spills in cold and bright and I’m stepping in stepping in stepping
into the metal belly of it all where everyone is already going somewhere already becoming
already half-lost in the hum and the roll and the endless forward push of wheels on rail like a
heartbeat that doesn’t belong to any one of us

and there’s the man with the briefcase not even a briefcase really just a box of obligations
swinging low at his side like gravity made personal his tie crooked like he meant to fix it and
forgot or didn’t care or cared too much and let it be crooked on purpose because perfection is
another kind of weight

and the woman with the quiet eyes and the headphones sealed in her own private weather tapping
her fingers soft soft soft like she’s counting invisible raindrops or remembering a song that never
ends and her reflection floats over the window over the blur of trees and wires and fences and it’s
hard to tell where she begins and the outside dissolves

and the kid kicking the seat not out of rebellion but out of overflow too much life in too small a
body and the parent beside them holding the line holding the world together with a tired hand
and a patience that’s been used before and will be used again tomorrow and tomorrow and
tomorrow

and the couple leaning together not speaking much because speech is unnecessary when
proximity says everything their shoulders aligned like twin rivers finding the same delta their
silence not empty but full of shared things unspoken things understood without naming
and the older man with the paper unfolding time itself page by page steady as a ritual like each
headline is a checkpoint on a road he’s walked before and will walk again and again and again
until the ink runs out or the breath does

and the phones glow everywhere little suns in laps and hands and everyone orbiting them bent
slightly forward like pilgrims toward a quiet altar of scrolling and tapping and refreshing as if
something essential might appear if only the timing is right

and the train keeps moving keeps humming keeps reminding us we are not fixed points but
passengers in a long chain of arrivals and departures brief encounters in a corridor of motion
where faces appear and vanish like stations that only exist when we pass through them
and outside the world streaks by in fragments—parking lots, brick walls, leafless branches, a
lone figure standing still as if they’ve opted out of the speed entirely—while inside we carry our
invisible loads our thoughts looping and branching and returning like restless birds that never
quite land

and someone laughs sudden bright and it breaks the hush for a second then folds back into the
fabric of the car like it was always there and always will be like everything here is temporary but
also repeating in cycles that don’t end

​

and I sit in the middle of it not separate not merged just drifting with the current of bodies and
breath and subtle movements of eyes and hands and shoulders and every so often catching a
glimpse of something real in a glance or a posture or the way a person adjusts their coat as if
adjusting their place in the universe

and the stops come and go like punctuation in a sentence nobody is reading out loud and doors
open and close and open again and people step off carrying their lives with them and others step
on carrying theirs in and the balance shifts but the motion never stops

and somewhere under all of it the rails singing the same long note the same long note the same
long note stretching out ahead like a promise that doesn’t need words just momentum just
forward just forward just forward