Lines on Transience, Composed on a Train

Today I'm back on a train, traveling down the East Coast. I go to graduate school just outside D.C., but am from New England, so I often make this trek to school or home.  To one life or the other -- to friends or family, until the lines between them blur and I begin to forget which is which.

Where is it I live? Which place is home?

I have lately found myself mistakenly entering "Fairfax, Connecticut" into address fields -- an amalgamation that exists in no state but my jumbled-up mind.

Outside the window, fleeting vistas rush by. I sit back and watch water, city, sky flash past. A perfect canvas on which to paint thought.

I close my eyes and think of the cache of moments that have made up my past few days.

Yesterday, closest at hand, is easiest to grab.

And just like that, I'm back in a car making its way through the hills of Northwestern CT.  They feel more like mountains as they rise, massive, around us. A blue slice of river snakes along the highway and sparkles under the winter sun.

A man I know well is at the wheel. My hand, for a moment, rests on his neck. A touch that's happened countless times in the previous chapter of my life. It's meant to comfort and innocent in intent. But now I feel a dab of something else when my fingers touch his skin. A little twinge of guilt. We're not together these days. He's with someone else, and I don't live here anymore. I remind myself that this touch is from the past, and I will have to leave it there soon. I should leave it there now.

He's taking me to see a college friend's new baby, someone we've both known for about ten years now. 

I decide to focus on the comfort in this thought. Things aren't that different, I tell myself. He's still there, after all, and so is she, this friend we're headed to see. We all mean different things to each other these days in a way, but we're making it work.

This friend, for example, she's a mom now, but we're still going to hang out this afternoon and talk. There's a reassurance in this, a hope that we can evolve with the passage of time.

And later that afternoon, after the guy has met her baby and left us to our girl-time, she and I do manage to get some conversation in.  This time we're just bouncing a squealing baby around as we chew on caramel bars and the stuff of life.

"Eventually," she says, "you have about 5 or 6 people who stick around.  More, and everything starts to get diluted. With time, I think our family starts to become our main connections."

I found myself nodding, agreeing with her about this shift, but recalling at the same time just how far away my family lives.

My parents, brother, sister, and I all live in separate states. So what about people like me, for whom family isn't readily available? Who do our connections become?

At different stages of my life, I've thought that friends could take the place of family.  But my thoughts are changing again now.

With all this constant flux around me, all I can really think is that we must hold fast to whoever we've got while we've got them, because everything is ever-evolving.

My friend standing before me, wearing a baby in a sling as she spoons sticky sushi rice for our lunch onto sheets of nori is an un-ignorable reminder of this.

The baby stirs, then nestles back into her chest.  The rice in the pot steams, the conversation flows, and we are together still, standing here in her cozy kitchen as we have before, with everything new, and everything the same.