I’m sitting on a train watching the night pass by, punctuated by glowing street lamps and the glittering, anonymous bodies of water reflecting them.

Reading excerpts from Patti Smith’s M Train. Is that meta? “It’s not so easy writing about nothing,” she proclaims.

A life is such a short time, and yet when he tells me to take it a day at a time the end of today always seems to be eternally far away. Some days I try to believe him when he tells me that there is something greater to it all, but this attempt at trust is not without a rising feeling of catastrophe. As Ben Lerner writes: “I felt, amid a general sense of doom, that other worlds were possible.”

I’m quiet in the mornings, thinking about how we will never truly land together. Not the way I imagined things would land. They warn me about it still: the sudden dropping, the letting go, the inevitable aloneness.

Do engineers plan for the details of exactly how the outcome looks? Or do they plan how to get there and stand surprised yet still admiring of the end result? Is there some disappointment? Most likely.

I remain in a state of anticipation (preparation?).

But I guess the moment we learn about gravity, we’re thinking again about how to achieve flight. And when already in midair, we’re looking for the safe fields in which to set down and tuck in our wings for a night.

The train is late arriving at the station. I was never meant to overstay.