One Semester Painful, Two Equals Death

Right now I should be on some overcrowded Amtrak train with about 6 oversized pieces of luggage. Inside these pieces of luggage rest my entire life, or the one that I’ve seemingly pieced together over the past 4 years. I should be awaking from my second or third nap and we should be somewhere outside of DC. There should be about 5 or 6 people that I can spot that look to be on the same journey I am. My phone should be flickering with text messages and voicemails of my friends telling how excited they are for me to get back and how me must celebrate our first night back after we unpack. Or maybe, I should be watching some illegally downloaded movie on my laptop to drown out the sound of the annoying middle aged white lady who wants to tell me her life story. I probably pretended to be slightly interested until Baltimore, and that’s where I settled into my first nap. My second nap would have started around the DC engine stop.



My ass starts to hurt from sitting so long somewhere around Richmond. That’s my cue to hit the snack car, which is at the complete opposite end of the train. I hate walking the train. I can never seem to keep my balance. My knees always lock too tightly and I fall, a minimum of 8 times. I make it to the snack car with only 5 dollars in cash. I always spend it all. 5 dollars will get you chips and a can soda. You can’t argue with those reasonable Amtrak prices. I make it back to my seat safely, eyeing maybe 3 reasonably attractive people on my way there.



Once the snacks are gone, I reach for my head phones and plug myself into to a masterfully crafted playlist that took me hours to make. Recline the stiff seat engraved with my ass print and try to zone out. Try to ignore the nervous that’s making my stomach rumble. The nervous that is making my toes tingle with that pee pee feeling. As hard as I try, ignoring it never makes it better. Just makes it more intense. There is always this type of anxiousness that I’ve only felt on the way back to school on the Amtrak train. On this six hour ride between the naps, and the movie, and the lady who snores, there is only time to think about what the semester will bring. What memories will carry over, which ones will be forgotten, and if any new ones will be made. And in my mind, its this big Broadway production with sex, lies, scandal and a happy ending. A 4.0 is the best happy ending you can get. The music is not helping that. It’s just providing the soundtrack for this nervous Amtrak fantasy. My legs begin to feel heavy. So I twist and turn and stretch as much as this space shared with this middle aged hag who beings to annoy me more with every snore she exhales. I want to push her to the floor. I wish I remember what stop she got said was hers. Maybe the next one?



The conductors keeps passing, they never have any answers. I wish they were more like first class flight attendants. I could really use a vodka tonic. It wouldn’t cure this anxiousness, but maybe it would make my legs lighter and put me to sleep again. To bad they don’t. Old ass men. Grey ass beards. One of them stops and informs our car that we will be an hour late to our destination.



Great, just what I need, a 7 hour train ride with these feelings stuck in my gut, my brain and now my fingertips. I need to write. I pull out the ratty composition book that I only use for train rides with the words “Without Permission” scribble across the top in bold graffiti style letters. I find a page that wasn’t scribbled on and begin to write about things that are of no concern to me right now. I write of love and heart break and death. I should be writing about being nervous or depression or insomnia. It always harder to write about what’s right in front of your face. I write anyway. I try to scribble stanzas about the sleep I know I’m going to lose. Or the way I know my stomach will Boy Scout knot it self into something dangerous. It’s always this same.



This ride. This fucking Amtrak ride. It never gets easier. It never gets harder either. It’s just always the same. The same.



Right now I should be on that train. I’m not. I’m still in my bedroom wondering why I didn’t push myself to get up and go to church. Wondering why there was no college fund, wondering how much money was wasted on heroine and crack binges, wondering why a father wouldn’t want more for his boy, wondering if I’m the only one who believes in this dream that I’ve busted ass to make a reality.



I wonder if they know how much I would give up so much for the nervousness of that ride right now. That fucking Amtrak ride. I would give so much. That ride, as nerve racking as it was, was good for me. It was apart of me that I could cling to with out feeling guilty. At the end of that ride, no matter how much my ass hurt, or how heavy my legs felt, I knew that opportunity was waiting at the other end. It welcomed the challenge of a new semester, but not this semester, or the last one. Regretfully, this semester I only welcome the challenge of throwing myself back into the “real world”. Becoming part of the working force, trying to scrape and dig and save my way back into a new semester, a semester closer to graduating, and becoming the adult I believe myself to be.