I wrote this a few weeks ago for my nonfiction class. Thought I'd share. Its a first draft and kind of long, but I felt like I should put something up. Here you go.
Midnight Trains
There’s something comforting about the sound of a freight train at night. I’m not sure what it is, or if that was a sound I grew up with—honestly, I can’t remember if there’s train tracks within hearing distance of the house I spent the first 18 years of my life. But in Provo, UT, where the nights are calm and thick, hearing the hollow hoot of a distant train whistle always triggers a deep breath, an exhale that isn’t forced that clears enough space for all the worry lines to smooth and straighten. I’m not sure at what point this started, but it seems that trains have always called to me, a friend in the distant dark.
And in the dark is when you need friends the most, especially when it is cold. For some reason the air temperature decides the feel of a night beyond my comfort level. Warm, slightly breezy summer nights are friendly, time to fraternize and bathe in the thickness of the warm starlight. Some of my most remembered times where carefully watched by summer moons, in the humid woods and fields around my parent’s house in Georgia or on the so-clean-you-could-eat-off-them sidewalks in and around BYU. Perhaps it is these associations that open a smile on my face when I enter a night like that, breathing it in like a favorite perfume. Or perhaps it is just the fact that the balminess of such nights enables calf-like cavorting that I love them.
But cold nights are thin, acerbic, like the after smell of vinegar. Those nights slice right through and make me feel very small, despite the layers and layers of clothes that I wear to shield me from the cold. The stars blink less, staring long and hard at my singular figure huddled and shuffling home. The night is cold, not only temperature-wise, but also in as many other ways as I can think. In the same places, back home where me and my family used to lay out on the lawn, looking for shooting stars, or in Provo where I used to roll in the snow like a dog with other snow-deprived Southerners, even where good things happen, the cold nights still stand still, watching in unfriendly silence. So I guess it’s not just that good things happen that I love summer nights, its something else. Something not as foolish as inherency and not as childlike as the boogie man, but something. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Perhaps it is the boogieman.
To this day, a day that finds me all of twenty-three years old, I’m afraid of the dark. What was once the boogieman has morphed into the burglar/rapist/creeper in a dark hoodie (hood up of course). I check and double-check the deadbolt every night. I have to touch it to be sure. Vertical means unlocked, horizontal is safe. If I haven’t checked, I’ll lie in bed unable to sleep. If I do fall asleep, I have dreams inspired by too many episodes of Criminal Minds. If I happen to be alone at night (not often with 5 other roommates), as soon as lights go out, I dash to my bed, entirely under the covers, where I pant between the increasingly warm and stifling sheets. Cause monsters can’t get you if you’re completely under the covers. Back home, where the darkness swallows up light in a tangle of loblolly pine and sweet gum branches, I don’t like walking the dogs at night. It’s always been my younger but certainly not littler brother’s job. If I have to, say a dog is sick, I stick to the front yard, within the reach of the porch light. Then we run back to the house, and I close the door behind me a little too fast and hide the panting in unhooking the leash, in taking off shoes.
It is night now, as I type this, not wearing shoes as I wiggle my toes against the STD-brown couch. I can never quite manage to write anything during the day, at least anything worth keeping. It is if all the best and brightest ideas need the foil of night to sparkle enough that I notice them. They creep from the corners of my mind, enticed by the glow of my laptop and worrisome amounts of caffeine, spurting onto the page. During the day, when there are lectures to attend, readings to read, papers to evaluate, and email to check. At night, when my ever-entertaining friends are gone, and my roommates have responsibly gone to bed, I can sit down and finally be productive. Without all that light taking up all the room, there is finally enough space to think, to breathe.
So, it is nights like these, cold and unfriendly, that I’m up, all alone, typing away, with Justin Bieber on loop and milk in a mason jar next to the ever-present Dr.Pepper. But I’m still up, while most people sleep right through, never knowing that the stars are staring at them, that there is a train in Provo that huff-puffs on its way somewhere else.
Seems strange, doesn’t it, that someone like me, who is still afraid of the dark, would sit up so long and alone in the dark? It is strange. No seeming about it. Just like it is strange that night can have bipolarly opposite personalities based on temperature. I’ve anthropomorphized natural occurrences to explain my own outlook, my own interpretations and worldview—that being warm is inherently good, cold inherently bad and that bad people and good ideas hide in the dark. Worldviews inherently tied up in contradictions that only tell a part of the whole, their convoluted shapes hiding the reality of the situation. Because as unfriendly as a cold winter nights may be, it is on those nights especially that I can best hear midnight trains in the distance.
