The Last One Waiting

Left Behind, Watching

When the world moves forward and you're still standing on the platform

I disappoint them. A shut mouth: what is the point? Trembling lips, and all morning I have disappeared like a turned down flower. I would like them to see the last of me, wherever this goes, however it ends, but I send them away quickly. And if they try coming back, I will send them away again. They do not belong here, nor I with them. Like the slow train cutting diagonal across the road. Where is it going? Into a field to disappear, where it will become grass, then hay. In the distance the cows are specks, and up close they are blobs, and all my figuring cannot stop life from being so. If I were good for them they would stay, and if I were meant for them, I would be capable.

The day is broken in half, and the hills have assembled together. I am not invited. A heaven has opened but it's the wrong heaven. I don't belong there, and the slow train is in the field, and the cows are lazy, and clouds have blotted out the sun, and the hills are gone.

The silence grows teeth. It chews through the afternoon like rust through metal. I watch my hands shake as I pour coffee that has gone cold, and I think about how even the simplest acts betray me. The spoon clatters against the cup, a sound too loud for this empty house, too sharp for this cotton-wool grief.

They used to call. Before I taught them not to. Before I perfected the art of pushing away what I cannot hold. The phone sits silent now, a monument to my own doing. I have succeeded in something, at least. I have succeeded in being alone.

The train has stopped moving. It sits in the field like a sleeping animal, and I wonder if it's broken or if it simply decided that here, among the weeds and wildflowers, is where it belongs. Maybe that's what disappearing really means—not vanishing, but finding the exact place where you fit, even if it's nowhere anyone would think to look.

I am the train in the field. Derailed from purpose, settled into the soft earth where nothing expects anything from me. Where I cannot disappoint the grass or fail the sky or let down the patient cows who accept everything exactly as it is.

There was a time when I believed in destinations. When I thought the tracks led somewhere worth going, when I imagined myself arriving at stations where people waited with flowers and relief. But arrival requires departure, and departure requires believing you deserve to reach the other side.

The wrong heaven closes. The right one never opens. And I am left here in the space between, where the air tastes like rain that never comes and the light falls wrong across my face. Where I have learned to be comfortable with being the one who stays behind, the one who doesn't belong to the story everyone else is telling.

Memory becomes a dangerous country. I visit it anyway, walking through scenes where I said the wrong thing, where I was too much or not enough, where I watched them realize I was not what they had hoped for. Their faces changing, the small deaths of expectation. How quickly love becomes politeness, how smoothly care transforms into duty.

The cows have moved closer. They regard me with the patience of creatures who understand that some things cannot be fixed, only witnessed. They do not try to comfort me or convince me I am wrong about myself. They simply exist beside my existing, and there is mercy in this.

Night falls like a curtain. The train becomes a shadow in the field, and I wonder if by morning it will have grown roots. If the earth will claim it completely, make it part of the landscape, something children will climb on without knowing what it once was meant to do.

Tomorrow the train will still be there. Becoming part of the landscape, growing into the earth. And I will still be here, learning to be grass, learning to be hay, learning to be the thing that feeds what comes after. Learning that sometimes the greatest kindness we can offer is to stop trying to be what we are not.

The field accepts everything. The broken train, the wandering cows, the hills that come and go. Even me, even this. Even the terrible grace of knowing exactly where I belong.