Train to the Midwest in a Scorpio’s Autumn

I’m enjoying this time, present and amber. Soft chuckles that roll on and even let tears coat my eyes. Reading as the caramelized trees whisk noiselessly, some only spires, framing or entrenched in chilled Virginia waters.

A book sits on my lap, a gentle one basted in care and a poet's spirit, and my mother sits next to me. Her first time on a train and a blessing it’s in autumn and it’s a blessing it’s by my side. There’s a warm but cooling coffee in my hands layered in a cardboard sheath like I am in a cardigan she bought me so many years ago now, on my way to see a life into this world.

When I tell people you’re coming, they say, “Yay, you’re going to be an aunt!” And I have stopped correcting them. I have stopped explaining that before there was you there was her. The first. I accept their joy and their wrongness, and I think of you and want to weep somewhere deep inside, too deep to reach right now. You were the first baby I held in my arms, like a sibling separated but by some arbitrary, quasi-generation. I was seven or eight, you honestly as big as me. And you’re gone now, like what Ocean said, on page 23, “‘When God says Well done.’”

I look to my left and see a man greying, yawning, immersed in word games; Wordle now. A game where you start nowhere and get exactly to the answer if you pay the most attention. You start anywhere, and I wonder where I’d start. Five letters; 'D A I S Y' comes to mind. Daisy? I don’t know much about them. Slim chance I could even pick them from a lineup. I think of the flowers I got a friend, the roses for mom, her roses for me. The way I felt and appreciated the warmth of family, being back this time. For once, I appreciated it, was present in it, after so many years behind hardened cellophane I thought was oxygen. And it’s all punctuated by autumn, my favorite season. The season most full of love and warmth beside its descent into coolness.

I feel tender for life right now, on my way to the start of yours. A girl, like the first. Maybe you’re the last. I remember that I heard somewhere that women have boys when they end a cycle, girls when they continue alchemy in the cycles of their own mother, a girl after a boy if they’re starting anew. I forget where I heard this and why, but I felt some truth to it. I hope there’s truth to it. If anyone could’ve healed something deep and ancient to start something anew, it would be her, my sister.

You’ll be a little sister, to a brother. I’m a little sister too. She wasn’t, the first. She was grown up in so many ways; I always felt like an imposter to her, unworthy and unsure in her hopeful gaze. I hope I don't feel like that with you. I don’t think I will. Because it’s been 17 years since then, since you came into my life. Two-and-a-half since you left it. A few days before this new return. I wonder if it’s fair to you, to ponder you both without borders between. If there’s any truth to it or perhaps just a way to cope with the enormity of feelings I can't separate let alone explain. Hope and grief, maybe like color, only made different by what surrounds it, the same in essence and hue and tambour when truly examined. I’ve been studying this since then, grief, since you left. The real world test of the theories I was toying with. As we slowed to a stop in a station, I supposed the bare trees should eerily scrape the rust and windows of the steel giant, skeletal appendages to drag, to snap me from my spiraling daisy daydreams. But there was silence apart from the hum of the air con and the slowing rhythm of metal on tracks.

and i wonder why the trees know not to touch