Adirondack

I imagined her.

I imagined that she was with me as I sat in the observation car of the Amtrak Adirondack 69 travelling from New York City to Montreal and saw from the corner of my eye as a bearded man let his wife/girlfriend lean her arm casually against him. Now he puts his arm around her white, freckled shoulder and she leans against his yellow summer shirt, and I imagined holding your hand self-consciously; it shall have to be self-conscious, unfortunately: I have been indoctrinated by the twin, disparate influences of pseudo-modern Indian social consciousness and Paul McCartney’s more self-effacing songs (as if His Lordship ever had to hide his love away).

On either side of the train stretches lake – the Great Lakes of our childhood American history books. The August wind wrinkles the membrane of the Lake, upon which graze weekend fishing boats and bits and pieces of driftwood from the trees that rim the lake like emerald mascara – remnants of a long-forgotten storm or hurricane.

Wrinkles. I wonder what it would be like to grow old with you. I catch the thought.

This is what I want to do. Ride with you in the train from New York City to Montreal and sit in the observation car and drink tiny cups of coffee and see the light rain leave skid marks on the rounded forward-swept windows and watch the bald eagles take off from the makeup trees in sweeping bursts of American symbolism and wave to old gentlemen who watch the train go by from their weekend boats, wearing sunglasses and meaningful paunches.

By the time we gain the legitimacy to travel together, alone, in offhand places, our lives shall be spoken-for and given names to and our relationships shall have a destination, coherent points of departure and arrival, a direction. Now when we can meander like elven spirits among the woods of the Great Lakes of North America and the untamed spaces between us and be true to our wanderlust that swells like a balloon under our solar plexus insisting on consummation, we are separated by Time and Distance and Overreaching Ambition. Never enough time to take each other’s touch for granted. Every second fought for and accounted for and saved up like pressed flowers in the too-rapidly-flipping blank pages of our mind’s scrapbook, while Desire slowly fades under the over-bright sun and we live out old vows for the sake of old memories.

And all this time the train chugs up the East Coast of North America and all the natural beauty – the soaring birds, the lakes and beautiful puddles and the lovely and dark and deep woods and the yellow autumn flowers and the yellow t-shirts and the freckles – is being left behind.

…

The overcast sky drips through holes in its fabric.