The girl on the train

Here is starting my steamy adventure towards East. I go back to basics: backpack and free spirit. No strings attached. Only my sheep and I. Resurrected. Happy. New. I choose endless American rail roads, like a beautiful epic dream… Even if I am going reversed, riding trains is a way to win the West, is a mythic American dream.

I am ready to rediscover the world. I go back to my first traveling steps’ origins. The unknown and I. The unknown and the excitement that colors my heart like a kaleidoscope. I am a Colorado butterfly, light and colorful, held by my new wings and curious antennas. My journey starts in the waiting hall which doesn’t look like a train station. As people were meeting here for the beauty of the place, oblivious of the train’s whistle so close. I gaze at this beautiful world, perplexed and intrigued. Perfectly aware of what I want. Utterly satisfied of who I am.

Then, my trip on the rails runs towards the night. Nebraska, land of plains and a bit more plains, is blind but smelly – its soils’ natural fertilizer perfumes the air with nauseating mood – ; certainly more mysterious for me than it deserves. I dreamt of the Orient Express and the atmosphere feels like a crime thriller instead. It is a bit shabby the deeper in the train I explore; believing the wagon bar would cheer me up, I am disappointed to find only one another passenger, my companion for the night though. I therefore meet my nigh early, hopping to see more of the US when I awake.

I think my next day rises in Iowa. I keep crossing America’s giant flatness only disturbed by a red fox, only altered by wood or bricks houses in provincial towns. Fleetingly mesmerized, cut and snowed cornfields flee towards the horizon in the far.
Cars are almost empty of course, everyone flies for such long distances. Only a few explorers like me snores in the morning car. Only a few Amish, reluctant to any kind of progress, match the anachronistic wagon’s lazy and metallic sound.
I, myself, get used to the train energy, not gloomy anymore, only simple and reel. Only prosaically poetic. I cheerfully sink into my travel diaries. Always talkative, never bored.

And I am suddenly pulled from my daydream by an iron bridge, rising above frozen and still water in a random town. To my simple pleasure, we cross it cradled by the meeting irons sound, immobile above the river as well. Hanging in between time and space. Does the idea of piling up times fill me with joy as my steps shiver with the train? Do the feeling that train has gone through here for one hundred years and going through with it color me with past memories?

I quickly go back to my written amusement, my view blinded by virgin and nude forests to Chicago.

It was not that epic in the end. A train like any other, whose window reveals a running scenery. My imagination is complete though. To have lived it and be able to create out of time tales based on memories. To keep it in mind and soon tell unreal and ordinary stories.