Like a Train

In the last month, I started going on walks. It was her idea. She’d since stopped. Each day I would walk past the same train tracks. I had never seen them. Never watched an old rustic train rattle past me.

I thought we were perfect together. At some point. The times when we were together. When she invited me to her parent’s. Her uncle and aunt were in town too. She had a big family. They seemingly liked one another. Her father killed it on the grill. It was warm, that day. She gave me a stick of gum on the drive home. It was orange.

I don’t know when. Or if it always was, and I was too foolish to notice. But we had become two people occupying the same space. We’d speak and… There was one day. I had just gotten home. Went upstairs, asked if she wanted anything, she said she did not, that she already had, I went back down, got myself something to eat. I returned to her, sat by her side, ready to eat. I then watched her leave, I waited for a bit. Then I finished eating. When I went back down to do the dishes, I found her seated in the living room, crocheting.

I remember when she suggested going on those walks. I agreed. And so we started walking. It took her a week and a half to grow tired of it. A week and a half of watching different mushrooms in the grass, or pointing at the sky whenever we saw a shade of blue we woke too late to view normally. Sometimes it would mix with other colours, her favourite was the slightly orange sky. A week and a half of walking by those tracks with her.

She loved like a train.