VI. Station

The train will be arriving shortly. Please be patient for the eternity you'll have to wait.

The platform is shockingly quiet.

It’s outdoors, and you know there’s some sort of sign of life if you were to go outside the gate, but you don’t have enough time before your train to really explore. So here you stay, stuck between coming and going.

This is your second train of the day, a quick(ish) stop as you head off on your next adventure. You love the train, actually—it’s a great environment for getting lost in your thoughts as you watch swathes of life pass you by. You’re equally entranced by the cities and villages you pass as you are the great green countryside. All these people who don’t know you’re sharing their lives, if only for a moment. Land that’s as unchanged as it can be, that’d likely still be recognizable—in some way, to the people that wandered about a hundred, two hundred years ago.

So no, the train is lovely. It’s the waiting in-between that gets you. The purgatory of the platform, stuck between one place and the next. You brought a book, and you have your music, but even so, you can feel the agony of waiting breathing down your neck. You want to move, to go, but you can’t so you have no choice but to sit. And wait. And wait.

It’s times like this, where you’re forced to stop, that Catholicism’s need to bypass the waiting period for heaven makes sense. Here, your indulgence is paid via the rattly old coffee machine. The coffee’s not good, but sipping it is a way to pass the time, at least.

The thing is, trains themselves are already liminal spaces. All travel is, but trains are by far the most existable. You’re not confined the way you are on a plane, and you don’t have to act the way you do in the car. It’s simply a place for those on their way somewhere to wait, and then they’re there.

But if trains are liminal, the train stations are extra-liminal. Super-liminal. Because in the train, your waiting has movement. Here, your waiting is still.

It’s maddening.

But the good news of this limbo is that it does always come to an end. The noticeboard blinks, announcing your train’s arrival. And in the moment, the rattling of the tracks is the sweetest noise you’ve heard in your life. It’s the joy of salvation in the form of hundreds of tons of metal coming to a screeching halt in front of you.

You hop to your feet, flooded with relief, and you make your way up the steps. You still have a way to go—you’re simply trading the meta-liminal with the normal kind, really. But you’re moving, and that’s what matters.