Was this train car actually built in Nebraska?

I heard Kawasaki was manufacturing subway cars, sending them off to Japan for everyone to ride from here to there and back again, in their suits and shoes, club skirts and boots...

It's a place on a map, 6,000 miles West or East, depending on your position.

But it's not real to you or to me, depending on our position.

And though I can write about trains and crowds and this or that, it's not real; and if I write about an earthquake sloshing around the contents of my cocktail, of my mind, it too isn't real.

Like a stupid, broken clock, life is on hold when you are gone.

That horizon that I can't see, it's still there, still exits. You wake up to it every morning and you stare at it as your car devours pavement. Out your window, left or right, everywhere, that horizon that is invisible here, obscured by mountains, housing, city blocks that aren't blocks at all, but tangled sculptures of civilization compacted...

It swallows you, it swallows your memory.

You could just dive into this place, like one of those swans, down, down, down, tumbling twisting for miles and miles, as deep as the city permits... to the bowels, my friend, to the bowels.

6,000 miles one way or another, people are living, working, playing, enjoying those things so forgotten, so foreign.

The dark house, warm in the winter, the low buzz of music forgotten. The heartbeats of roommates asleep, tucked away in their beds. The smell of incense and carpet that hasn't been vacuumed in months.

Dirty ashtrays, house parties and the laughter of those who understand the meaning of the great American road trip; bottle rockets and box wine, sitting on a porch doing nothing but watching traffic creep b y like stagnated blood from all that fucking Burger King you ate back in high school, back when you drove cars like your hair was long, hot blooded, nothing to lose, so ignorant it was... so blissful.

Why can't we go back to that dark room? Maybe there was a Lava Lamp.

We don't feel anymore... not the same.

Time does it to us all, but distance does it in a different way.

The mirrors all look different here, and so do I.

So it's funny that I'm riding on a train that was possibly assembled in my hometown?

Ha, ha, ha, I know...

Why didn't I just ride it there? Taken a factory tour, perhaps, why not, why not? What drives us to cross oceans, to leave everything comfortable and concrete, to forsake everything familiar; to risk it all.

A few screws loose, like that broken clock--our lives standing still we jolt them forward with a voltage highly irregular and unnecessary. Travelers like us don't march to different drums, no, not hardly, our hearts beat like butterfly wings flirt with the breeze--calm and playful on the surface, truly reckless beneath. Fragile... crashing.

Too fast, we play, too fast.

But it's our nature, and it's why we cry at night. It's why every time we leave, our eyes sag to our chins and we walk carrying our own weight in tears.

No experience is new enough, and yet, the only one's we truly desire are those consumed the past, replayed over and over and over again not in our mind, but in our skin.

The kind of memory that makes you twinge.

The kind of memory that is physical, built into the body, written on the veins of your heart.

It makes you catch your breath, thinking about it, and yet...

What is life even about, then? The new experience or remembering the old? The anticipation or the actual climax, the moment when you realize you are standing at that point on the map that you've been staring at for months and months. Is it that moment... certainly not--but oh how your heart burned when you dreamed and planned, oh how there was fire--real fucking fire--inside of you.

You had to.

But it's never as sweet--nothing is, of course.

So, when is it supposed to be good?

Now, later, before?

Past, present, future?

If you could play your life back, feeling every moment as it had felt the first time, would it feel as sweet as the memory?

Because although memories burn too, they are a burn that can never be satisfied. What's done is done, and what's now will soon be memory, and it continues on to infinity.

What are we looking forward to, again?

The moment, the memory? That Polaroid hanging on the refrigerator.

When the lights go out we can paint what we like.

My hobby is remembering.