Trains

I no longer begrudge those who crisscross the globe. A thirst that is never quite quenched. Social media posts are never enough. That’s ok.

I remember the month, in the late 70s, traversing Europe with you. My borrowed money that didn’t last. Paper maps no plans just faith and love. We got lost. Missed trains. Ended up where we never intended to be. No camera. No photos. Regrets? No.

Now I’m old and boring you say. Forty-five years of putting up with my undisciplined mind is wearing thin LOL.

I see the universal in the smallest things tho.

You kindly helped clean my mother’s apartment after she died. Photographs no one claimed. Relatives in black and white no one remembers.

But I’ve discovered something — how staying still can be its own journey. How the familiar becomes new like when you listen carefully to the sometimes cacophonous sounds of birds.

How we travel in different directions but somehow end up in the same place — trying to find meaning in the spaces between, whether they’re captured in pixels or held close in a distant memory.

The photographs in mother’s apartment. We should have kept more of them. Not for the faces we didn’t recognize but maybe because someone thought they were worth saving.

Now I take pictures of the unremarkable. Old buildings. Morning shadows. Your coffee cup next to mine.

Evidence that we were here. Then gone. Stillness becomes its own beginning and end.