Monday on the train

By India Das-Brown

It was a Monday when I took the train cross-country and wallowed. 

I had spent too long with my own thoughts of late, as I’d drifted to and fro between Hometown, Newtown and Othertown, and the result was a kind of red-and-green-tinged weakness of mind that I was still mistaking for poetic clarity. But it was not weakness that was on my mind when I took the train cross-country. On my mind were the worlds I occupied―one at a time, but sometimes many at once; how it was interesting to move in and out of them, and to figure out how to fit into them. 

I can’t tell you much about Othertown, for reasons unspecified, but I can tell you some about Hometown, and a bit less about Newtown. Hometown was a place of grey skies, grey-blue waters, fast-growing bean plants and balanced meals. Anger was around, and so was passivity and exasperation. But there was also puppy-dog-stare and tousled hair. There were people with eyes, people with strong legs and weak backs, people without ears. 

There, most of the time, I took the form of a green-skinned, soft-voiced, everyday gremlin. But sometimes, I was more of a girl.

And recently, in Newtown: I directed thought mostly inward and asked myself how I felt about sexism; I stared at people on the metro, flashed wide-toothed smiles at passerby and asked church recruiters about their five-year plans; and most of all, I liked to dial up my aesthetic sensibilities and posture as some sort of kind, blossoming young girl—sometimes even woman, if the situation called for it. 

In the taxi that morning, on my way to the station in Hometown, the driver asked me my greatest asset. “Pr-pre―like, precision of expression―if you know what I mean,” I had said, searching his eyes in the rearview mirror. He asked if I meant I was stubborn and I said Yes I Can Be. He said he was stubborn too. He said he was Ethiopian and found me shy. I said, well, I think it depends on what I want to project; I said what about you, are you shy? and I think he said no, but he spoke too quietly to really tell, and I was too worried about missing the train to really listen. When he unloaded the piano―my keyboard-in-a-plastic-bag-with-rope-wrapped-around-it―from the trunk, he said, with cinematic vagueness: You’re An Interesting Girl. I waddled quickly inside, overlaid with bags and my keyboard, and boarded just as the gate closed.

On the train on Monday, I decided the hallmarks of truth are grey-haired preposterousness, bleached-blonde specificity and bald-headed awareness, and wondered if that was just my truth or also other people’s. I also realised that I had only been in love with two people in my life: Myself, and Everybody Else. Both had disappointed me. Both were interesting enough to reflect on for a while.

It was Everybody Else who liked to oscillate between fascinating and repugnant, and Myself who brought me my highest highs and my lowest lows. It was Myself who had become more formidable-but-practical over time, and Everybody Else who had become more puerile. My attraction to the former seemed to grow more sisterly and less marital the more I got to know her, while the latter appeared more beautiful than I had initially noticed, but also far uglier and less sensible. And I found, upon close examination, the biggest problem was in how these two creatures interacted. 

The problem was simple, I decided, and entirely internal: I longed to be part of the world, but took enormous pleasure in being different. Thank god I looked normal—at least for now, and had a sweet-little-girl-voice. Thank god I was soft to the touch, and somewhat warm.

I stared with wide-open-eyes at the other passengers in Car 5 and thanked god some more. Here was a man with three chins and a large silver wristwatch; a pursed-lipped lady in a small pink jacket; somebody in green who, physically, was a mix of the two. Inside, I said: Thank god, for my obsession with Everybody Else—it keeps me from losing Myself! in Myself! and with difficulty, attempted to wrench my feelings from deep inside my stomach and regurgitate them. I decided it would not be possible to put them here on the page, but that I would try again, if the situation called for it.

I thought about how the older men in my family like to congratulate their women on being slender and helpful. My thoughts shifted from particular to lazy as I attempted to reflect on sexism. I asked: What use are these thoughts, if they’re not really written down? I said: Thank You, to the girl with lovely eyelashes who gave me a wooden spoon to eat my food-in-a-plastic-box with. 

I said: Thank you—to think therefore to halfway understand, and took a bite of my green-beans-and-trout. I spoke in imprecise French to the elderly man beside me about the State of Processed Food in the Modern World until he lay back and dozed off—his long, bumpy nose pointed straight up to the ceiling.

I took a vow of honesty, in English, in present tense, and stared glassy-eyed, straight out the window for approximately 93 hours.

By the time we arrived in Newtown, my Concept of Things had morphed into something purple and duller. I stared half-eyed at the yellow-haired, youngish fellow in Row 7 until he fetched my bags and keyboard. 

I said Oh! Thank You, and waddled off with my arms shaking under the weight of it all.