I keep laughing in a rare way. I am on a train, drinking a radler I bought in a convenience store and it keeps hitting me where I am, across the world and in the unknown, and I smile and that smile turns into a laugh. All airports smell the same and they are so far from each other.
My only communication since arriving at the train station in Dusseldorf airport has been with the young man sitting across from me. He’s probably about my age, maybe a little younger. He’s handsome and dark-skinned with thick brown hair, fashionable tattered black jeans and a light blue button-up. I tried to ask if he minded me sitting across from him. He didn’t understand, and I quickly realized that it’s because we do not speak the same language. So, after sitting down anyway and him not seeming to mind, before I opened my radler, I typed into my phone’s translator, “can I drink this on the train?” He read it quickly then looked at me, smiled wide and toothy and warm,and replied “Ya!”
He and I, on opposite sides of the set of four chairs, passed by hollowed out buildings at a speed that made my stomach hollow and motion sick before I got used to it a few minutes into my first train ride ever. Maybe we were thinking the same thoughts about different things in ways we cannot convey to one another. I swear there was thought in his eyes.
The abandoned buildings were beautiful, hit by the evening sunlight, the image filtered through a train window and pollen, nothing more than detritus left to be spray painted more heavily, and it made me smile, seeing that beauty and newness in the old. Then I laughed a little, sipping the lemony drink in my hand.
Chaos comes on a yearly cycle for me, or at least, it seems to. Breakups, breakdowns, death, failure, they have a pattern I’ve tried to decode and fix with my habits. Though, it doesn’t seem to work and I often fall into my old and negligent rhythms and they drive people away or they drive me further from myself.
This trip is a break, but a good one; pre up or down. I created this chaos myself, I have broken some pattern and not wallowed too much in fallout from outward chaos and manifested my own before the wake settles it all and I must simply move on. I am those heavily spray painted buildings: reutilized, completely hollow in some places, and in the evening sunlight, when everything is old and wonderful and waiting for night, we are beautiful, with all the duskbugs coming to flit around our shining and broken parts and translate to us that it is okay to drink on trains, conveyed by a smile.
-Daylon M. Phillips (08/08/2018)
Daylon M. Phillips 