Sometimes the words find you and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they leave you stranded and wanting. Wanting to organize your mind into paragraphs and words and sentences and clauses and decorate them with periods and question marks and the like. Wanting to show the world a colored picture painted from twenty six black and white brushes. They refuse to come until they are forced, unbidden from their hiding places, to show the world what it has not known. To show the world what it has not felt. To show the world a thing in which it has not seen before. Until change pushes them into the open, the words will stay hidden. Safe.

It is in this moment, as I sit remembering a time alone, riding parallel against a train, that the words finally make their way to the surface. They choose to come, after much poking and prodding and faltering at the keyboard. They come, but they are neither moving nor beautiful. The taste of words that will not come, complete nothingness, is bitter on my tongue and I can feel the tingle of wanting that creeps down my spine as I search for the words that seem to be always evading me.

The longer I sit and concentrate on the words, the longer I force myself into the loneliness of that moment with the train, the easier it becomes to find the words that have tried to bury themselves. The longer I sit in solitude and darkness, the more the repressed memories seem to push and pull and tug at the words, driving them into the world that I and they too, are afraid of but must eventually face.

When finally, those words do come, they bring with them pain and perhaps in the end, some comfort. It becomes a miserable game of searching and finding and just so an unappreciative world might know, even for a second that I existed. It is difficult to discuss the depth in which the words are written; a code that will never be fully understood, perhaps even by its author.

To think, all of this because I kept the company of a train today and it seemed not to mind. It did not whisper to me words of wisdom, nor did it offer advice. It simply travelled along side of me and for a small moment, I was not quite so alone as I had felt. For a moment, the strange desire to find those lost words ceased. For a moment, there was no need to explain myself to the world.

Alas, the train was not destined to quiet longing in my heart for the words. It was merely meant to give me a moment of peace away from the things that I could not – cannot – control.