I woke up this morning and I never wanted to write here again. Then I went to work and asked someone a question and didn't wait to hear the answer (again) before rushing away. And then I walked home crying and embarrassed because every time I tried to pick a quiet street about 60 cars went by or a school group, or a gaggle of little old ladies.

Finally in st. henri I took the scenic route through an old storm gutter and up to the field by the train tracks and sat on a milk crate watching the longest train in the world pass by me.

The field is in front of the old Monsieur Eggroll. There are factories and cranes to the left, and my first st Henri apartment is nestled to the right behind the stolen car garage thirty feet from where the track turns towards me.

It was a transport train going by. It had everything in the world strapped to its flats and tucked away in its box cars. Tree-trunks, propane, cattle, wheat. I think it was as long as Quebec. I sat there for forty minutes, watching it unspool before me, a rolling paen to the gross domestic product and patron saint of the punks poets and graffiti artists of saint henri.

Birds hopped around in the field quietly, the clouds were high-decked french grey, it was comfortably windy. To my right the wheels made a shrieking track noise, and my tears were slowing and then speeding up again. Kind of following the train of my thoughts, which unlike the train in front of me, were miniscule and sad, and kept circling back to how I couldn't see how who I was could ever change.

In photographs of my maternal grandfather and my mother there is something wrong with their eyes. They have big liquid eyes, brown like muddy water or like chocolate sauce on a sundae depending on their mood. There is a genetic trait towards shadows under the eyes, and small pouchs.

In the pictures, they never look at you, they always look up and to the left. Also, there is something missing in their eyes, not so obvious as when photos of the dead are retouched to take the glow from the iris but similiar.

Whatever was in my mom that could have helped her love who she was - isn't there. I think the British call it spine or fortitude, I think my therapist calls it "parenting the self", who cares. Neither of them seem to have had it.

It's waking up in the morning and not wishing to heap scorn upon ones own head. It's avoiding the last beer, had while lying down in bed. It's probably so essential we don't know what to call it. It's not a spirit or a soul or anything religious. It's a basic survival impulse. Or maybe not just to survive, to survive and make that survival into some kind of triumphal dance. It's to be joyous, and to be thankful and to see the world as essentially a beneficial place. It's also being able to step outside oneself, and to love something/someone else, not just to need them. I know that sounds preachy there's nothing I can do about it.

Who cares right? neither of them had it. They were geniuses both of them, and they thought they themselves and the world itself, basically sucked rocks a lot of the time. But who cares, right. Because I am not one of them, and they are both gone now.

Last night I stared at the picture of my mother taken at her graduation from nursing school. She is smiling and staring away and there is the thing that should be there in her eyes that isn't there. That got less an less and less from the drinking I think, or maybe from life itself, taking away her ability to manufacture the stuff, the hope or the faith that was required.

I am terrified and look in the mirror to see if I don't have the thing either, if I will grow old and my eyes will get pouchier and i will get sadder not happier, and ask more questions of people without caring to hear the answer because all I care about is where the rest of me has gone and why won't it come back.

In the feld the train is still slowly going, filled with the raw material of life, and I am on my milk crate feeling as empty as the train is full, a kind of peace has descended. I imagine taking the train somewhere else - somewhere as abandoned as this field but emptier. Where I can build myself a home that is new and better. Where it doesn't matter how many mistakes I have already made and will make again, and who isn't speaking to me, and who isn't there to be spoken to anymore, and probably I will not have to learn to listen because I will be the only one there.

I wish I could end this post and say, there now I feel better, I don't know whether that would be a lie. Or if it would be telling myself the truth, that soon, probably sooner than I think, I will feel better.

The train eventually passed. The sound growing lighter on one side. Which is experienced as a physical sensation, the weight on one side liftng, the landcape staying vast to my right and reducing itself to a human-scale neighbourhood to my left.

I crossed the tracks towards the park, and my apartment, and my life. Which hasn't changed significantly yet - but, I hope, will.

postcript: As my dad pointed out I have my mothers eyes and nose, But i have his chin and his hips. So sometimes I wonder if the way one treats life can be firmly divided into inherited body parts. I have my mothers forehead and her vision but when I speak you hear my fathers voice and when I am moving I use his directions..

Posted by Miriam at April 25, 2005 2:37 PM | TrackBack Posted to death and dying