The Train Goes Rumbling On

By Matthew Giles

TW: Suicidal Thoughts, Depression, Mental Illness

The train is very warm, and I’m so very tired. Outside the fields are white, the sky is black, and I imagine it is silent. I want nothing more than to go into it, to climb from the carriage, hop the fence and walk amongst the stillness. I imagine the crunch of the snow in which my feet will sink, the powder turning to water as it touches the warmth of my ankles and falls into my shoes. I imagine the wetness at my trouser hems, the soddenness of my socks turning quickly grey to black, and the weight my laces gain as the snow becomes a part of them. The tracks I tread are dead almost as soon as they are born, continuously covered by the never-ending flurry; yet I walk on, toward the softly curving hills of snow from which the lonely bones of trees arise. I pass sheep left out to pasture and the frozen trough from which they drink. They huddle in their woolen warmth and peer out at a man whose shirt and tie flap absurdly in the wind, whose nose runs like a child’s, whose mean and pink and jealous hands can hardly hold his leather briefcase. How I wonder what they think of him. Finally, I reach the hill’s steep summit and the copse of branches bare and black. I sit down on a wounded stump and look out upon a patchwork quilt of black and whitened vastness, strewn between the static lights of distant life and very faintly crisscrossed by the twinkling, slithering threads of motorways and trains. I think to myself how wonderful it might be to die out here, alone. One shot, painless, ringing out across the fields, inevitably quieted by the blanket of the night; a sudden stream of crimson in the snow. To return myself unto the earth; to be buried by the morning flurry; to lie down here and cry until my body freezes over, and the insects and the birds arrive to glean from it their sustenance. What could be more peaceful than to sleep out here forever, turning slowly pink to grey to white, to black as all the whiteness melts and winter turns to spring, and the ground softens beneath me and at last welcomes me in?

‘Ticket please sir’, she says, holding out her hand. And so, all is forgotten; the train goes rumbling on.