Home Volume 5 (long metal box)

Yesterday I rode a train. It felt like home.

More home than anything else this week.

That seems offensive. The coffee and the bed and blurred lights on a tree should feel like home.

They do, but not like this.

Slumped on this hard blue chair I realize I haven’t written anything since I was on a train last time.

the words I penned last:

"Where will I write?

without this long metal box.

Where else can my eyes drink in so much art in so little time?

Walls crammed full of colors and messages I can’t read- and not because of the language.

These colours well up to become words in me.

How will I think deeply?

without backward facing seats offering empty wondering space.

Where will I find inspiration?

without humanity’s tired worn eyes darting between screens and the outside world.

I used to be so intimidated by these eyes, so afraid they would find me to be foreign.

Afraid they would know I was terrified and lost in the civilisations of my mind.

This metal box is more like a quirky moving living room.

Its windows like televisions

eyes running over worlds I'll never step into.

That tiny pink house in Diegem

the family that hunkers there

they’ll never know me

never find out I'm faking it.

Making it.

Finding my way one more time.

It is space and time, really,

this metal box.

A disintegrating of distraction.

Just jingling keys and a uniformed man muttering to passengers.

It genuinely frightens me to lose routine time in this metal box.

I’ll trade arriving early

and long blank stares into the distance

and windy platforms

and waiting

and people.

Soon it’ll be cars and music and phone calls and traffic

I have to find new space when I get to where I’m going”

But here I am again. I found a long metal box here and it feels like home.

& here come the words again…

flowing thick and sticky like warm honey and

I drink them in and make them obedient to fingers on a keyboard.

What is it about this movement that slows the chaos of my mind?

it’s better than sleep…

to be awake and at peace

I sink lower into this rear-facing

hard

cold

blue

seat and whisper to myself

”I’m safe.”

home.