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[smallvince]

Train ride, mid July. Anja was resting her head on my shoulder, the rhythm of her silent breathing tamed the summertime entropy. I raised my eyes and looked over her hair as it was being painted by the sunset light. The hills of inland Slovakia were not too dissimilar from those one can see in Molise, the Italian region where I am from. I wonder if, when two beings are nurtured by the same scenery, they move past each other more easily when the time comes to do so. The old couple sitting across from us had familiar features too. They were not speaking, not using phones, not reading or entertain each other in any other way. They just happened to be there, their mind seemed to be empty as they kept their eyes low - like one does when one doesn’t want to be noticed. Did their quiet sceneries find a way of conversing without speaking? Or were they pondering on bad news they had just received in the city, on their way back home? Difficult to tell, as only too often pain and happiness graze in the same meadow. The only thing I could tell for sure is that I felt like I knew they’re stories, intertwined as they were with the change of seasons. Anja used to speak about seasons all the time. ‘You are a new and beautiful season in my life’, she used to tell me, but her tender expression turning into an open smile always distracted me from the simple truth - seasons change.

We were not travelling heavy - certain kinds of travelling require to invest in nimbleness in order to be really prepared for what’s to come. Our bags were stashed rather unsafely in the upper compartment of the cabin, with the exception of the ‘snack-bag’ which laid half empty just next to us. ‘They are fine like that, don’t you worry’, Anja said, pointing with her eyes to the bags swinging wildly above our heads. Then she finished the cheese sandwich I had prepared for her and she found my shoulder again. I believed her because I had been on these kind of trains before - their wooden bulkhead and green leather seat with lacquered brass edges. This train spoke a different and ancient language altogether, one that I used to know. Anja didn’t know that I had seen men stuffed with Buprenorphine climbing the walls of those cabins as if they were asylum seekers desperate to break in a church in the Middle Age: for them, the upper compartment served both  as bunk and a practical hideout from the ticket inspector.  As I was thinking of them, a ticket inspector came to check our tickets. I went to rouse Anja and as if the present moment was nothing but the smallest doll to be found inside of a Matryoshka set, I snap out of my daydream as a ticket inspector walks down the aisle of the carriage I am otherwise alone in. I had never seen a ticket inspector on a Eurostar train, let alone a night train like that one. He doesn't even bother and after throwing a look of disappointment at me, he leaves. This whole train must be completely empty. I guess people are following governments’ advice for once and avoiding travelling. I press my face onto the cold window, searching in shapeless blackness for the same thing I was searching for during that mid July train ride. Every journey is a journey to the edge of happiness.

What only happened this morning feels as if it happened years ago. As I walked up the road to meet Lisa near the train station, it was as if I had all of a sudden found a different kind of energy. After two weeks of being quarantined in my house (just like the rest of the country), I discovered myself nimble again, my strides were quick and effortless. The feelings of exhaustion and anxiety that had so far ruled my days were gone, everything was calm. This sense of focus, a protection from the harshness of daylight, suddenly melted away as I raised my eyes from the greyness of the sidewalk and noticed Lisa waiting for me at the other side of the crossing. She was laughing. ‘Oh don’t you worry, I brought some for you also’, I said, ‘you gotta wear them too’. I handed her a pair of surgical gloves and a face mask. With my great surprise, she happily accepted my ‘isolation-gifts’ and we walked together to the supermarket - objective: buy as much as we could and get back home still in one piece, which is not to be taken for granted given the current situation the world is experiencing.

‘How was your morning? How’re you feeling today?’, Lisa asked while we were queuing for our turn to enter the supermarket. She asked it in such a way that her question already contained my answer in it. Nonetheless, I felt compelled in giving a non-verbal reply - which must have been quite difficult to read (as most of my face was hidden buy the green mask) cause I actually had to start dancing around like Mr. Bean in order to make her grasp what kind of insanity I was in the grip of. 

‘Ahahah what is this supposed to mean?’ ‘That I’ve got an idea’ ‘…right. What idea? What do you mean?’ ‘It’s a bit of a crazy idea…’ ‘Wait, does it involve…who I think it involves?’ ‘Yee’, I replied. My dancing skills started to earn me some fans in the queue. ‘Oh my God, what is it?’ ‘Well, I am thinking of going there. I have worked out the itinerary, I could go by train as far as Prague and then I’ll wing it from there’ ‘Are you fucking serious?’ ‘What do you mean? What makes you think I am not serious right now?’, I said, as the dance intensified. ‘Do you understand that this is insane? She will probably think you’re crazy and will get you locked up!’

I am now thinking back to what Lisa said, sitting on an Eurostar night train to Bruxelles. I left the house just after her and her boyfriend went to bed. The three of us joked about this foolish journey I wanted to undertake for the whole evening. ‘Ahahah so we are going to find a letter explaining the reasons why you left?’, Lisa’s boyfriend joked. At the end of the day, this whole idea came about as just a joke. However, things have a way of falling into place when there’s nothing left to fall back on, when you surrender to the simplicity of your emotions and act accordingly. That it’s exactly how I was feeling as I walked up the road towards the station, for the second time today, invested with purpose and focus. I felt the same way when I left for London, almost 6 years ago - like I didn’t have a choice, because what I was doing was simply the right thing to do. Every journey is a journey to the edge of happiness - we just never fully know which way we are coming from. While sitting on this train, sinking deeper in the Earth under the Channel’s billions cubic meters of water, I realise that only from here it would be possible to stare directly at the sun without burning one’s eyes. Is it possible that all I have been doing in the past year and a half is searching for what I already had - but was not able to see? If that is true, then there is not much difference between this train ride and the one in mid July. Just that I am on my own this time.