So, you have this great, big train station. When you first arrive through its gates, you know you’re in for a lot of waiting. And very few people, I think, would spend the entire wait staring at the clock. If the conditions are right, or if you’re the sort to do so, you may strike up a conversation with a stranger next to you.
You talk. You find points of connection. You find you relate over shared experiences–you’ve both been struggling with the chaotic lockdowns, it’s hard to find work in this city at this time, and this person is on their way to the suburbs to see family–and you maybe do, on some level, bond.
But eventually, they leave.
That is the foundational fact of you being at the train station. You’re there to leave. Everyone is there to leave. If you weren’t going elsewhere, then you wouldn’t be there at all.
Their train pulled into the station long before yours, so they’ve left. And you’ll never see them again. But that doesn’t mean that your conversation with them wasn’t worth the time, or meant nothing, or that you could just as easily forget you ever talked. More likely than not, you’re still lingering on the details of that conversation.
And, if you look around you’d find…there are always people coming and going, alighting and boarding. The populace of a train station never remains the same for long. And every single one of them brings as rich an internal life, as rich a history, as the person before. While every single interaction will be irreplaceably unique–that’s the wonder of human bonds–there’s always a life past each goodbye. Always more people arriving in the station, and you don’t know their stories yet.
I first started thinking this way when I was dealing with the worst of my grief about my breakup. His family was family to me. His mother especially. She fed me through the first year of my arrival when I didn’t know how to cook, bought me winter-wear when I didn’t have the experience to handle it. She let me call her mom. We connected so easily, we played silly time-wasting mobile games together, and it was the first time I’d felt loved by a parental figure. The first time I truly got it, how good it felt to be loved.
She hugged me and let me cry into her shoulder the day my ex broke up with me. She invited me to her home again 3 months later. But my friendship with my ex inevitably decayed, till it became too hard to return to those spaces. And with it, I lost her, too.
How was I supposed to reckon with being cut off from that love so suddenly? In that period, and even now, I question if I could ever form a bond that felt so irreplaceably special again. I’ll never get back what I lost, and I know it–no relationship is replaceable. I still cry about it. I find reminders everywhere, all the time, of how it felt to be so loved.
But in the past year, somehow, I’ve made new friends. Friends who talked with me on the riverside till midnight, friends who got wasted with me and let me crash their place for the night, who performed music gigs with me, who send me music recommendations at random, who celebrate my joys with me. I fell in love with new people. People fell in love with me. I finished stories, I started new ones. I renewed old friendships and found I could relate to them in new ways.
They’re not filling the hollow of what’s gone, or burying it. They’re more like…the vines that grow over the remains of a grand and fallen tree. You’ve still got the wreckage everywhere, and it’ll be there for years to come–and everything that comes after grows around and into the shape of what lay there before. But boy, is it gonna grow. Maybe not all at once. Maybe just a bit of grass. But you don’t know when passing animals are gonna deposit seeds there. And something about knowing it could happen…something could grow…it makes it worth carrying on.
And, I think I am able to believe, now, that my ex and his mother and his sister are not the last people who will ever love me like family. I think that each person who’s talked to me–in times of joy, in times of crisis–has carried a similar light, though in a different hue or brightness.
Well, we’re all here now. We’re going somewhere, and we don’t know where that is. That’s the foundational fact of us being here. But yeah, we’re all here, in this big train station, together, right now, waiting. And we don’t all have to spend it staring at the clock.
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