There’s a Freight Train in the Attic

I think I misunderstood the point of surviving.

For a long time, I thought the goal was to become harder to destroy.

It seemed reasonable. You learn which things cut and stop reaching for them. You learn which doors slam and keep your hands out of the frame. You learn that not every feeling deserves to become an action, not every impulse deserves obedience, not every fire deserves more oxygen.

Eventually, you get very good at surviving.

So good, in fact, that you may not notice how little of you is required for it.

I didn’t.

I thought I was becoming stable.

Measured.

Safe.

There are worse things to become.

There are also considerably more interesting ones.

I remembered that recently.

It happened quickly.

One moment I was standing in the life I had become accustomed to, and the next there seemed to be more of me than there was room for.

Thoughts came faster.

Words came easier.

Want returned with terrible manners.

I wanted to make things. To go places. To stay awake too late following an idea simply because I could not bear to leave it unfinished until morning.

I wanted people.

I wanted music loud enough to interrupt thought.

I wanted tomorrow to hurry the fuck up.

None of this should have felt unfamiliar.

Once, it hadn’t.

But there is a peculiar grief in recognizing your own handwriting after years of believing the author dead.

I had found him only recently.

Apparently he had plans.

The first evidence was the weather.

A few things disappeared.

Some I mourned.

Some I watched leave with the uncomfortable realization that I had been maintaining them mostly because they had been there yesterday.

Others had roots deeper than I knew.

Those hurt when they came up.

There is no graceful way to uproot something that has grown around your foundation.

Sometimes the foundation comes with it.

For a while, there was noise everywhere.

Then, suddenly, there wasn’t.

And I found myself standing inside a silence that asked nothing of me.

No answer.

No explanation.

No careful rearranging of language until everyone could live comfortably inside my version of the truth.

Nothing left to negotiate.

Just air.

It is remarkable how much oxygen can enter a life once you stop using all of it to keep something else alive.

I did not know what to do with that much.

At first.

Then things started catching.

Old things.

A sentence at midnight.

A half-finished painting.

A ridiculous idea that became three more before I could write down the first.

Curiosity.

Desire.

Joy, occasionally, arriving without knocking and leaving the door open behind it.

I recognized the heat before I recognized the fire.

That frightened me.

I have spent a great deal of time writing about fire.

Mostly what remains after it.

Ash.

Scars.

Blackened earth.

The stubborn green things that eventually push through anyway.

I became very interested in what could grow after burning.

Less interested in burning.

Fire had become something to survive long enough to make useful later.

Turn it into a lesson.

Turn it into art.

Turn it into a garden.

Anything but let it remain what it was.

Dangerous.

Hungry.

Alive.

I knew fire could destroy.

I had simply forgotten that destruction was not its only talent.

Fire produces heat.

That realization should not have surprised me as much as it did.

Heat.

Before the ashes.

Before the rebuilding.

Before anything needs to become a metaphor for resilience.

Just warmth.

Energy moving from one thing into another.

Enough heat changes things.

Water, for instance.

Water is patient.

It takes the shape it is given. Settles into whatever holds it. Finds the lowest place in the room and stays there.

Until it gets hot enough.

Then even water refuses containment.

It becomes steam.

And steam can move an extraordinary amount of weight.

I have been thinking about weight lately.

How much of it a person can carry before they forget they are carrying anything at all.

How quickly heavy becomes normal.

How strange your own body feels when you finally put something down.

Maybe that is why I heard it.

At first, I thought the sound was thunder.

I have had reason to become familiar with thunder recently.

But thunder does not keep time.

This did.

Slow.

Distant.

Steady.

The kind of sound you feel through the floor before you understand what your ears are telling you.

I listened.

There it was again.

Something enormous was moving.

Or trying to.

And suddenly I remembered the attic.

I don’t know when I forgot it.

I suppose that is the trouble with forgetting. If you could remember when it happened, you probably wouldn’t have forgotten much at all.

I looked up.

There was considerably more house above me than I remembered.

And somewhere inside it, something exhaled steam.

A freight train.

In the attic.

Naturally.

I have stopped demanding reasonable explanations from this house.

Some things are easier to understand if you let them remain impossible.

So I did.

I listened to the engine.

To that low, patient rhythm.

To all that weight waiting behind motion.

And I wondered how long it had been there.

How many years I had lived underneath it without hearing a thing.

Maybe it had been silent.

Maybe I had.

Either way, it wasn’t silent now.

There was fire somewhere inside it.

There was water becoming something less willing to stay where it had been put.

There was pressure building without apology.

There was enough heat to move iron.

For the first time in a very long time, none of that sounded dangerous.

It sounded useful.

It sounded like leaving.

Then I remembered something else about trains.

They need tracks.

I almost laughed.

Of course they do.

You can have all the fire in the world.

All the pressure.

All the impossible machinery.

You can remember every forgotten piece of yourself and gather it into one enormous engine.

And still—

you need somewhere to go.

I looked outside.

That was when I understood what the hurricane had been doing.

The landscape was hardly recognizable.

There were gaps where things had stood for years. Old branches torn down. Whole stretches opened to the sky.

Not clean.

Not painless.

But open.

The hurricane had not built anything.

It had not needed to.

It had simply refused to go around what stood in its way.

And there, through everything it had cleared, I could finally see them.

Tracks.

Not new.

That mattered.

They had been there.

Under everything.

Waiting.

The hurricane had not made the way forward.

It had made it visible.

I stood there listening to the engine gather itself somewhere above me.

And I thought about all the years I had spent trying to become less.

Less volatile.

Less hungry.

Less easily moved.

I thought that was how you kept a life from burning down.

Maybe sometimes it is.

But I am beginning to suspect there are things worse than fire.

A cold house, for one.

A stationary life.

A perfectly preserved version of yourself that never goes anywhere.

There is a freight train in the attic.

I don’t know where it is going yet.

But the fire is lit.

The steam is rising.

And the hurricane has cleared the tracks.