Unsettled Places — The Passing Train

There are dreams that disappear with such completeness they leave behind only an atmosphere. The story withdraws first. Faces follow. Conversation is the easiest to abandon. By morning there remains only a platform and waiting.

A platform belongs to neither arrival nor departure. It keeps both without claiming either. Steel. Concrete. Glass. A timetable no one studies for long. The smell of rain on the tracks. A paper cup cooling on a bench. Shoes turning towards a sound still beyond hearing.

Someone stands beside you.

There is no effort to remember who. Dreams have little interest in biography. Presence is enough.

You wait.

Not for anything in particular, but because waiting has become the shape of the place. Time settles differently here. Even thought begins to move at the pace of distant signals changing colour.

Then movement.

Not yours.

A train enters from the opposite track, close enough for its passing to gather the air around you. There is no collision. Only the astonishment that something so large had been approaching without asking to be seen.

It is already gone before surprise has found its name.

Perhaps places exist because something passes through them. A harbour without ships becomes another edge of water. A theatre without voices becomes timber and velvet. A platform without trains is only concrete beside steel.

Music understands this. A phrase receives its shape from another that has already vanished. The note that remains is not the one still sounding, but the room it has altered.

Dreams possess the same courtesy. They do not explain themselves. They pass close enough to disturb the air, then continue beyond recollection, leaving only a change too small to measure and too quiet to ignore.

By evening there is no wish to recover what has been forgotten.

The platform is enough.

The passing train is enough.

You wait a little longer.

The silence arrives afterwards. Notitia Health — attending to what passes through perception.