After seven days, four involving train travel (with an extra nine hours and sixty dollars added to the sum total consumed by the eastbound journey) and three involving a laid back fling with the soulmate I only see in passing every six to twenty months, I'm closer now to home than I have been--which is to say, here on a train, cold and tired and very much in discomfort, I'm twelve hours away from a warm bed and nourishing food, but also to say that the whole reason I bought the tickets back in February and the whole reason I made that week-long trip to South Carolina at the text of a friend just prior to leaving for LA is just a little bit clearer.
I'm not good at the important things in life. I'm not good at patience, or grace, or humility, or gentleness, or faith. I'm not good at vulnerability. All along the way I'm too hasty, or too careless, or too something, and rough around the edges besides. The wear and tear shows.
When I told one of my girls that I'd be on a train for four days, she said (and this of itself is a testament of what I love so much about her), "That is either going to be one hell of a ride or a very interestingly spent four days aboard the train. Start writing a book?" Partly because of that, and partly for the sheer need of an alone space in these crowded little cubicles of sweating, cramped humanity, I've scribbled plenty in these past four days. In fact, I've probably written more in these past four days than in the three and a half months this year has to call its own. And that, in itself, is a sort of grace. That these rough edges and this ill-timed, perfectly fated trip are coming together in a scrawling of letters into words into whole sentences, and sentences into paragraphs (because isn't that what sentences are for? community?).
At least, that is what I've been telling myself for the past several days. And I've kept putting fingers to keyboard and writing, through California, through Nevada, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, New York. The scenery has become familiar again, but I'm still peeking out the window at intervals, looking for the perfect scene of which to snap the perfect photo. And I'm looking, anxiously, for those signs that will tell me we're in familiar territory again, and that in my bones I can feel that this small leg of the journey is fulfilled, and that it's time to move to something slightly different, but always building on the last thing.
Because this is the thing that I look forward to most, always, whenever I've bolted and wound my way in a sidetracked circle back towards the people I love most: that even when the days are hard and I'm snagging myself on my rough edges, that there's always enough light and enough beauty in the world to make the whole of the journey worthwhile, even when I don't have enough of anything to measure up.
Which is why I'm always curiously settled, at the end of the day, with the empty pockets and pressing deadlines that hit hard after I've detoured a new road on my way home, even though numbers don't always add up and sometimes I panic. What I remember on the way around is nothing a balanced account can teach me.
And then there's always that delightful feeling in the pit of the stomach that comes from having nine people in this world who can make me smile like no one else can, and every time I leave them I know where home lies. I love how the journey brings me back to them every. single. time.
No comments:
Post a Comment