Foreign transportation
The doors open. First an announcement, a friendly tune. It can be any city. One singular adult against a door. It isn’t any city. The tune is a tradition, an old song. When it plays it impacts every passenger like code, like the code of a child’s jingle played out from a toy — everything is simple and calm. The city spreads out from the river on both sides. An old river, that the train now passes above.
The train is well lit, clean, and spacious. Each seat is taken but there is room to stand. Tired men and women commute back from work. Every single passenger on their phone.
I'm going nowhere in particular and somewhere specific. I'm going because I have the chance to go but not the intention or a task at hand. I go to exit my quiet apartment and to keep on the move, to be moved, somewhere.
The seasons are changing again. I'm far from a home. On my own. The air is crisp and starting to chill. A single adult against a door. It's passing by through the glass window. It's rushing like the workday. Everyone is going somewhere and you are in Seoul, passing the time, like a bridge back to a place you haven't been to yet, like a term set for punishment, handed out in advance.
You’re gaining wisdom though. Feeling the lack of comfort in your shoes. Like that first fall when you were thirteen and went off to Ottawa for school. Maple trees lining the backyards where you walked a path from dorm room to classroom. Where walking alone you first noticed the hollow and the quiet comfort it too called. The maple leafs all changing colors, and you saw them there first but didn’t know. You felt sick and alone but now you look back and know. It’s a place you hardly ever visited but you know it well. That same feeling you run from, alone.
You’ll look back to being in that foreign place and one day, here too, doors opening, you’ll remember in advance that you’ve known.
