trains, snow and journeys

Trains seem to be inspiring places for me - quite possibly in the wrong ways - but as I sit on a train journey that has extended from its 8 hour predicted length to 12 hours - I feel more alive than I have done for a while.

I suppose that’s what a break from two days embedded in questions of ethnic cleansing and rape in wartime in the Caucasus accompanied with a stinking cold does for one.

Sitting here on this train though, with the darkness surrounding me and whizzing past me on either side I feel enveloped in a sense of the possibility of the world. It feels like a train to anywhere, to everywhere. It has no location - as staring out of the window reveals only my own gazing reflection staring back. Flashes of mist and night do not belong to the names of the towns that we stop at and every station has the same lonsome traveller, brooding families, crappy cafe. We are travelling through nowhere and through everywhere all at once, suspended between Christmas in Cardiff and my final smester at St Andrews and the inevitable 10 days of dissertation madness that are about to begin. Yet, as well as the drab dull uniformity of Britain that does place this train in a geography, a culture, a location -- there is the journey that I am following in my head.

It is a journey to olive groves in Israel-Palestine, to bizarres in Turkey, to a cold winter’s day and a struggle to learn Russian, it is all of the half remembered sun baked future moments in South America. It is confined by my imagination which must piece together photographs I have seen of the grime and the colours of chinese noodle sellers, and the feeling of walking the streets of Quito for the first time and wondering whether that translates to what Rio would feel like in Autumn. It is about a warehouse in California where I once went blues dancing and smelled the sweat of many bodies, it is about puking out of a bus in Paraguay and feeling wholly awful, weak and at the mercy of strangers. My journey is every anecdote I have heard of the Middle East, it is what the Armenians and Georgians I met this summer told me about Turkey and Iran. It incorporates every other journey I have ever taken. Yet it is a journey that has no definite location. It is a journey about the potential for journeying.

And it is a surprise to realise that it is a journey I am taking alone.

In the Steiner philosophy a child cannot eat meat until they have first acknowledged the self, realised the ego, the ‘I’ and what that stands for. It takes quite a long time for children to stop talking in the third person ‘Becky wants to travel’ and to begin to use the first person, ‘I want to travel’.
Somehow I feel as though this train journey and the imagined journey going on in my head as I undertake it might possibly have an element of that child Becky realising her ego, realising her ‘I’. This lonely and individual interaction with this bright gleaming world seems to make sense. The idea that the journey I am taking and will take come June when the restraints of university end will be my own seems quite revolutionary. And quite debilitatingly beautiful. I have agency and I alone can and am choosing.

One of my biggest fears for such a long time has been the idea of being stuck somewhere entirely alone. People are a drug that I can’t quite get over, and as I sit here on my train going nowhere and everywhere simultaneously, with drops of rain beginning to dribble down the window pains and a changeover of people occuring every half hour or so it suddenly seems to be okay and even inspiring that come June I am alone. Alone but not lonely. For in this contentment. In this ‘I’ , my connections with people can be stronger, more certain, can be for the right reasons. They are about choice rather than fear of being lonely. And journeys are about more than just a need to make friendships with people. They are about a desire to know and connect, not a neccesity to interact.

We pull in to another station - much like the others - only this time it is mine - it is Haymarket. And although I want to stay curled in my seat in quiet contemplations about journeying. It is the beginning of this new semester, of the finishing off of my dissertation, of the close of my time in St Andrews. And it is the pull of a place where there are still things left unfinished.