Chapter 36
Ifound myself in the middle of nowhere waiting for my ride.
There was nothing here other than train tracks and a few oddly bent telephone poles.
The landscape was barren, boring, bland.
Nothing like the city back home. Then again, most places weren’t.
I could hear the faint hum of the train approaching long before I saw it.
The closer it got, the more it rattled behind my ribs, readying me to do the next thing on my list.
They say trains don’t stop for their riders; instead they barrel through—without mercy, pausing momentarily to let you embark and then they’re off again, desperate to get to their next destination.
If you step on the tracks, it’s over. The weight, the steel, the motion—it’ll completely erase you.
But that wasn’t what I wanted. Not this time.
I didn’t want to get erased. I wanted to ride it.
I wanted to grab onto something that wasn’t made to hold me.
Let it carry me away. Let the friction rip something open.
Let the noise drown everything else out.
The freight track I found sliced through a no-name patch of Montana.
Nothing picturesque. Just bare brush, a cracked horizon, and air that smelled like dry rust and old leaves.
The train came sooner than I had expected it to.
It roared past me with a shriek of steel, like a monster with somewhere to be.
All metal, smoke and noise. I ran for it.
Stupidly. Recklessly. Every nerve in my body fired at once.
My boots skidded on gravel as I launched myself at the side of a boxcar.
I caught the rungs of the ladder, almost yanking my arm from its socket, and hauled myself up.
One knee smashed into steel causing a jolt of pain to light up my leg, but I didn’t let go.
The metal was cold and rough. The wind screamed past me.
My body slammed against the car as I climbed up the rungs of the ladder, chest heaving, ears ringing.
By the time I got to the top, I was breathless, bleeding, and gripping the steel beneath my hands knowing that it could save me or end me.
I crawled flat and pressed myself against it.
Chest to metal. Arms spread. The world blurred around me.
The sky appeared too wide, the land was too empty, and I lay there thinking, this should be it.
Let this be the one. Let the wind throw me.
Let a sharp turn do me in. Let something snap.
But it didn’t. The train just kept going.
And so did I. I could feel the rattle of every mile beneath me.
I imagined the motion to be like being rocked inside the womb but it wasn’t soothing, instead it invigorated me.
Somewhere along the stretch, I lifted my head just enough to look at the sky.
It was a drab gray; the stars weren’t peeking through yet.
I thought about how funny it was that I liked the sky back home better than this one when it was the exact same sky.
But the New York sky felt like it was alive, like it had a pulse, and something to say…
where this one was just flat and empty. Maybe that was the point.
The sky was the same everywhere… but what you did under it was what made a place feel like home, even if home was a small apartment with nothing living in it but me.
I closed my eyes again, waiting for something to happen.
But something else came instead. Silence.
Not outside of me but within me. For the first time in weeks, everything went quiet.
No static of anxiety, no screaming nightmares, no echo of what I’d done or what had been done to me.
All that my senses knew was the metal and wind.
And the knowledge that I was still here.
Hours passed or minutes, I didn’t know. I didn’t jump, I didn’t roll off, I didn’t try harder to make something happen.
I just… held on and allowed the peace to envelop me with every swaying motion.
Eventually, the train slowed near a junction.
The brakes screeched, the noise gyrated in my ears.
I climbed down on shaky legs and got off the train like a man waking from a trance.
I limped into the grass and sat down, watching everyone else disembark, ignoring their stares.
Why? That was the only question I had left.
Why was I still here? If I knew what my purpose was, if I knew what I was supposed to be doing, maybe then I could manage my fucked-up brain, maybe then I could handle this world.
But not like this. I couldn’t do it anymore like this.
This way was clearly not working out for me.
By the time I’d made it back to my car, my phone had five missed calls and four texts from Carter.
CARTER
Dude, where are you?
CARTER
Just checking in. You alive? Hopefully yes. Preferably yes.
CARTER
Say something. Anything.
CARTER
Happy Halloween.
I stared at the screen for a long time. We had evolved into this odd little relationship where I had begun to feel bad when I didn’t answer him.
But sometimes answering a text message took literally all of the energy inside of me.
So instead of texting something back that felt meaningless, that drained me of the little bit of shit I had left to give, I unlocked my phone, opened the camera, lifted it, and filmed the empty tracks behind me.
The flat sky above them. The vast, uncaring silence around me.
Then I texted him the video with a message that said, “I’m still here.
” I didn’t wish him a happy Halloween. I couldn’t.
The Deacon used to say Halloween was the devil’s holiday, that good, godly people didn’t celebrate it.
No candy, no costumes, no jack-o’-lanterns.
Just sermons about sin and eternal salvation.
And yet the same man who preached purity would come into my room at night and put his hands where they didn’t belong.
I could never figure out how dressing up as Batman was evil but hurting me was fine.
I recalled being so angry and betrayed when I learned that Jesus had died for the Deacon’s sins because it let him do whatever he wanted to me, and he’d still get off scot-free.
I remember watching the other kids through the window, plastic pumpkins clutched in their hands, faces lit up by porch lights and sugar highs.
I had wanted to be out there with them so badly it had made my chest ache, but all I could do was press my forehead to the glass and hope that better days would one day find me.
“Imagine he writes a book and tells us why he’s doing this shit. I’d pre order it so fast.”
“Every time he posts a new video I sigh with relief.”
“Riding a train while it’s moving like a normal Friday. Mkay.”
“None of us know what we’re doing here, babe. Some of us just hide the confusion better.”