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And the train cutting through the fields, which were flooded with moonlight, and the dark shapes of the trees, making a small wind break beyond, and the way his mind swayed in quiet rhythm with the train and all of the things he was now forgetting about his mother who was gone, and just the train and the moonlit fields now, where once, he’d had a mother, who read to him at night, night after night, her voice curling around the words, so much like the quiet rhythm of the train, which carried him through the flooded fields and back into his childhood, which he missed so much, not the specific things anymore, but just the way his mother’s voice carried him into sleep, and the way he used to stay awake at his window, and watch the white orb of the moon hung in the trees, and the sound of the grasshoppers in the wet grass, and nameless insects whirring in the trees and all that was passing now as the train rolled along, and he thought he could see, in the nameless fields, a glimpse of his childhood self, somewhere across the distant fields, in a window, illuminated, a square of light, and a child watching the night gather in the trees, and that nameless child thinking, as he thought, of how the darkness, if his mother was near, did not scare him, but made him feel that to be alone was safe, was good, was the shape of a life to come.
Author's Note:
I tend to find joy in meditating, gardening, and walking. These practices really help to stabilize me as I sift through the myriad of distractions and requirements of the day. I love to just sit and briefly quiet my mind.
Andrew Bertaina is the author of the essay collection, The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus Books), and the short story collection One Person Away From You (2021). More of his work is available at andrewbertaina.com. He has an MFA from American University in Washington, DC.
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