train to chicago

A few years ago I would take a train from Cleveland to visit Laura while she lived on a farm outside Chicago. I found some music I listened to on those trips and the whole experience is coming back to me while I listen to it.

The train left at 4AM and people looking dead tired and sleepless. The sound of rolling over the tracks, gently swaying back and forth, slowing for turns and picking back up to speed over long stretches, the sun coming up and filtering in through tinted windows. I can remember the books I took with me and read, the people I sometimes sat next to, passing those decrepit houses in northwest Ohio next to train tracks with their yards in uncomfortably joyous disrepair.

The tenseness of separation heightened by an anticipated imminent reunion mixed with the stink of strangers' body odor. Struggling over some math problem, hearing the compartment's door lurch open and slam shut, somehow going over a lake, slicing it in two, strange clouds, doodles and notes to self I won't quite understand later when I look them over. Urban, suburban, rural, continuous transition from each to the other and back again. Picking up more people and the mad rush for a smoke break causes aisle congestion, dining car smells drifting, the hovering isolation that comes with means to ends that go on too long, patterned carpet with a simple tiling, catanery telephone lines that rise and fall like crayola kindergarten waves, while drifting haphazardly toward and away from me. Feeling conflicted when the music ends.