Trust the Train

"Train arrives, sixteen coaches long."

The Carter Family sang that on a song called 'Worried Man'.

By the time Junior Parker recorded 'Mystery Train' for Sam Phillips, he had changed it to:

"Train I ride, sixteen coaches long."

---

My train is fourteen coaches long. I lost two a few weeks back. One of them got jammed up by heavy leaves on the tracks and got itself stuck. The other one stayed behind to help. Now I'm two short of the full set. I feel lighter - but also more alone. Sometimes, losing part of you means you move faster. And other times it causes an imbalance that just slows you down.

Freight trains pull through the center of New Orleans during the dead of night. They blow their horns loudly through the darkness. I can sleep through the noise, but I don't know if I'm supposed to. 

And Confused Rhythms

When the season turned warm, she folded away her tight black jeans and off-grey, plaid slacks and laid them into a couple of large plastic boxes with blue snap-closures. In their place, she filled the cast-iron, free-standing rack at the end of her bed with a parade of long summer dresses. Light, white and shapeless cotton, decorated with faded patterned grids of flowers, horses and fruit.

At night, when she turned up the air conditioner before going to bed, they all swayed gently in a confused rhythm.

My favourite dress of all was the one with all those Champagne labels on it. No label appeared more than once and there must've been twenty different champagne houses represented - each label more obscure than the next. It was almost as if a frustrated sommelier had been driven out of the industry and now made clothes adorned with wines she wished she was selling instead.

Three Blind Mice

Jade knew which of her stories would be my favourites. Even from before I had ever heard her speak any of them. She knew which colours to brush up in the background; what songs to plug into the soundtrack; the right buttons to lean on in the middle; and that exact, hushed volume to drop down to at the end.

Like a fortune teller with a neon sign, a round crochet tablecloth and a front parlor in old East Hollywood, she read my tells and told me the tales I needed to hear.

Her stories were based on real events. But more than just the names and the places had been changed. 

There were stories of train rides home from concerts that happened before she was born; heart break over boys she never loved; a blood cancer diagnoses that wasn't hers; glossy, golden hoop earnings coming out for a fight that led to her getting booted from the very same high school she also rode all the way to graduation; and of tender kisses with fallen legends behind broken windows and shattered bamboo blinds.

When I talk about her now - to say a therapist or a handyman or a Hinge second-date - I cop to be being played. I admit it. I know it now. I know that her stories were only a facade - a veneer without an off-switch. A pretty and useful surface. Her only method for radiating - but never reflecting - beauty. But it was still only a surface. And, if you lasted long enough for a chance to scratch at it, underneath was just a plunging void that felt like that fast and sudden drop you experience as you fade into sleep on nights of exhaustion.