A thousand miles from anywhere quite like home

I’m waiting for the train when Bob Seger, Against The Wind, starts playing on my headphones.

And I think back to how your parents set that up for the funeral slideshow, background music.

Watching photos go by in the windows of passing cars. One of you and me, twenty years ago,

before elementary school one morning, catching crayfish and garter snakes in the backwaters of

the ponds and creeks off 9th Ave. Railroad-scummy, creosote-laden waterways. Dodging the

rocks the trains kick up and scatter over our heads. Harvesters, figuring out how to survive

another day.

Cold tunnel air, pushed by the train, knocks me down and I’m on my knees on a platform

surrounded by people and wondering why everyone is gone on their own terms. The air is cold

for the coast but not for the prairies. Stack friends because you never know when the next one

will leave. It’s been a long couple decades and I don’t know if it’s going to get any better. All I

got is sunrises.

Against the wind.

We should have never stopped running. Away through the back hills of Buffalo Pound, forts and

old bison skulls, there’s no sand in a lake of a million bones. Just shattered pieces from a long,

long time ago. Before trains, and Bob Seger, and I moved to Vancouver, and you were still

around. Watching another sunrise and not getting the wind knocked out of you by early morning

trains passing by.

‍