The night train

The train leaves at a quarter to eleven, and you are already settled in your seat by the window. The station is half-empty. A man in a yellow vest sweeps the platform in slow, unhurried arcs. The light above the door ticks through its warm orange rhythm. None of it has anything to do with you, and that is exactly right.

You have a small bag at your feet, a coat folded on the seat beside you, and nowhere to be until morning. The train gives a long, low note, the kind that sounds more like a yawn than a warning, and begins to move. The platform slides away. The yellow-vested man grows small. The town's last few lit windows go past one by one, like someone switching off a house.

The carriage is nearly empty. A woman two rows up has pulled her scarf over her eyes. Someone further back is already breathing in the slow rhythm of sleep. The lights dim a little on their own. Outside, the world becomes mostly dark, with the occasional farmhouse throwing a square of gold across a field before letting it go.

The train rocks. Not sharply, not impatiently — the way a boat rocks when it has decided it likes you. The rails make their steady sound underneath, like rain that has learned to keep time. You let your head rest against the window. The glass is cool, then warm, then just there.

Somewhere outside, a river runs beside the track for a while. You can't see it, but you can feel the crossing — the sound changes, opens out, like the train taking a breath over water. Then the trees close in again and the sound settles back to its low conversation.

You think about the place you're leaving. Not with worry. The way you'd think of a room you've already tidied and closed the door on. Whatever was unfinished there will still be there tomorrow, and tomorrow is a very long way off from this rocking dark.

The conductor passes through the carriage, slow as syrup, checking tickets that almost nobody has. When they reach you, they smile and nod, not expecting an answer. Even the small formalities of this journey are soft and forgiving.

The train crosses a small town where a single streetlight holds a circle of quiet. A dog walks down the middle of the road, unhurried, the king of a sleeping kingdom. Behind a window, someone's television paints the wall in changing blue. Then it's all behind you, and the dark is whole again.

You close your eyes. The motion of the train has become a kind of breathing, and your own breathing has quietly agreed to match it. In, as the wheels roll over a long stretch of rail. Out, as they carry on. There is nothing to watch, nothing to answer, nothing to decide.

A tunnel comes. The sound deepens and wraps around the carriage like a blanket pulled up to the chin. For a minute, the dark outside and the dark behind your eyelids are the same dark. The train hums its low note. You feel the journey holding you the way a hammock holds someone who has finally stopped trying to get comfortable.

When the train comes out of the tunnel, you are not fully awake to see it, and that is alright. The stars are out, a generous scattering of them, doing what stars do. The train keeps its steady pace. Somewhere ahead, hours away, a station is getting ready to receive you, but it can wait. Everything can wait.

Your breathing has slowed to the pace of the rails. The scarf-woman shifts and settles. The train leans into a gentle curve, and you lean with it, and there is nothing left in the whole dark world that requires you to stay awake.