train stopping

It feels like stepping off the train one station too late. 

You look around for a moment dazed. Slowly the pieces fall together.  The benches are painted a different shade of green, the buildings too close, the people all wrong.... confusion fades and you begin backtracking through a mile of mistakes.

The silence always settles in soft and slow like that:  What did I just do?  How did get back here? 

It rolls in like morning mist in the mountains.  Dew and sunlight mingling with smoke from last nights dying fire.  

It feels that way too.  You wake and your whole body hurts.  Breath but no words.  Sleep but no rest.  Coffee but no comfort.  

I know most often I can wait it out, catch the next train so to speak.  Wait for something or someone to haphazardly light me a signpost and I can usually do the rest.  

But this isn't one of those moments.  I woke drowning in the blue.  Deeper in than I have been in a long time.

I look around to find the train station is abandoned.  As if no one has been here in years.  In both directions there is nothing but darkened, waterlogged tracks.  Quietly wasting in grey sleep.

All I seem to have carried with me in my bag is a memory of the memory of his voice telling me "one foot in front of the other".  Yes Dear, one foot in front of the other... today all that leads me to is the strong want to go straight back to bed.  I probably would not be missed.  I think back to yesterday walking unnoticed like a ghost- no I would not be missed until I was needed.  When I am not needed I am not known.  I'm sure it doesn't matter.   

What I'm not sure of is where I even thought I was going before I got off at the wrong stop.  But if you are riding trains you must have a some point purchased a ticket with a clear destination.  

I think mine reads: There is no prize for being capable. 

I can see what it looks like down the road.  It appears to be very much the same as where I just came from.  Me standing alone trying to figure out exactly how I came to be standing alone.   

I miss the calm vastness of the desert.  

I miss the peace of slipping beneath cold blue mountain water. 

I miss me.