Just Passing Through

Chapter 1: A Night Train

Present Day, Winter

The California Zephyr takes thirty-five hours to get from Denver, Colorado to San Francisco, California. If I was any decent at math, I wouldn't be using what little battery life remained of my phone to Google the breakdown of this particular measurement of time. But as a writer, and as the coin flip tends to go, math was never my strong suit. And I could most certainly use the distraction, being that I was just barely an hour in.

Journal laid flat and wheels turning beneath me, it was starting to take hold. 35 hours. 2,100 minutes. 126,000 seconds. Where complete strangers from anywhere and everywhere, come together with absolutely nothing in common. Not the past, not our demons, not the number in our bank accounts, not our Netflix passwords, nor our hopes, dreams and deep, dark secrets. Nothing, but 35 hours. 2,100 minutes. 126,000 seconds.

That... and a train ticket.

As I held onto my own a little too tightly, I took in what would be my temporary home for the next two days. For $150 a head, I figured the space would have been pristine. Velvet green carpet converging into mahogany walls, golden drapes falling just so, and interspersed leather chairs cradling the kind of people you see on travel brochures: well-dressed families laughing over card games and beaming couples with pearly white grins gingerly tapping their champagne glasses. But here in the dimly lit observation car, I saw none of that. Instead, a drab hodgepodge of grays and dark blues. Or was it all grays? It was hard to tell under the harsh, fluorescent light flickering from a broken ceiling fixture, one that oddly reminded me of my old cubicle back in Denver. As for the people, there was no laughter or champagne clinks, no friendly staff coming to assist with the patrons' every beck and call. Just the stale air of snoring travelers and scattered commuters fighting the day's end by staring blindly into the pages of a book, some form of technology, or the underside of their eyelids.

For me, it was my own thoughts I was fighting. And, with it, I had already wished the slim chance of a good night's sleep goodbye. Restless fingertips took its place, my mind temporarily at bay focusing on the task of folding the corners of my ticket again and again as if grooming a hangnail. Any other weekend day, this route would be taking me on a straight shot to the mountains. A slew of skis and boards secured on the roof of someone's 4x4, shoulder to shoulder with friends packed in like sardines, and not a care in the world but the snow conditions to come.

I stared back down at the ticket in my hand, its folds vaguely taking shape of one those poorly made origami fortune tellers from when I was a kid. Each corner revealing fortunes like "You'll be rich!" "You'll be famous!" "You'll fall in love!" "You'll be happy!" But this piece of paper made no such promises, empty as they were. Only a place. A date. A time. And ink that now stained my fingers in small, dark splotches thanks to the falling slush outside. Though damp, it still felt light as a feather. As for me, not so much.

One way. The words stood out like the stern voice of a mother, or in my own case, father, interrogating their self-willed child, "Are you sure about this...?" How a few simple words could feel like a dull knife piercing through one's conscience, suddenly making them question even the most foolproof of plans. But this wasn't foolproof. Far from it actually. This was an impulse. One brought on by an influx of wrong turns, weed dust, and red wine.

And so, what else was there to do, but glance out the window of the one-way train that would take me far away from my first failed attempt at this thing called life. As I scoured the distant mountains for some clue, any indication that these wrong turns had finally led to the right one, my imagination only took me farther away, back to a much simpler time: last summer, after my college graduation.

My best friend Jules and I had packed two months' worth into a pair of backpacks and swapped our Boulder digs for nine weeks around Southeast Asia. Towards the end of our trip, we found ourselves in the Balinese town of Ubud, clinging onto the time we had left before embarking on the real world. There, surrounded by terraced rice paddies, Hindu temples and shrines, and some cheap island weed Jules had scored from a hostel friend––that, if I'm being honest, smelled a touch like oregano––we took in the world and dreamt of the future roles we might play in it.