To The Lady on the Train,
We stand on the edge an escarpment looking over the vast expanse of the grassland savannah below us. The westering sun sits fat and low on the horizon bathing the world in an orange pink glow and stretching our shadows behind us. Dust on our bare feet and hot air on our faces, we breath and cannot do more than take in what we are being shown, to be witness to the sounds and sights of this place and time.
A breeze picks up and blows your gauze white blouse and skirt to press against the front of your body and billow out behind you, and in this moment you look like a statue carved out of marble. A study of motion caught in magical stillness.
From the wide valley below us and the great plain behind us the sounds of crickets and birds surround us. It is a wild symphony that drones and yet changes, a sea of sounds through the distant heat shimmer, we watch a great herd of animals move past the Acacia trees. The zebras, wildebeasts, and buffalo, and giraffes move along paths that their ancestors have carved into this earth. They follow the migrations by a memory made by thousands of years of their ancestors moving across this place. The ebb and flow of seasons and beasts across this landscape for eons has shaped this savannah and those that live upon it. They have shaped each other, they are connected in a way that cannot be untangled. And once, our ancient ancestors might have stood here and marveled at the living earth below just as we are now. They may have travelled on those same paths following the herds, and they an integral part of the cycles of life and death. The depth of time is incomprehensible, but it is felt.
We have reached through distance and time to come to this place, to watch the land breathing through centuries, never changing and yet never the same. We are just the next small link between the past and whatever future is to come. This moment is ours to hold, the catch between inhale and exhale. Of all of the foot prints upon this land, ours are only the most recent and soon will be erased. But we will always have been here. The land will always be a part of us just as we are a part of her.
I turn to watch you, to look upon your face. And the sunlight glows upon your face, showing the dust on your eyebrows, the sweat at your temple... I can see the lines of a life lived with joy and sorrow, not unlike the trails made by migrations... I see the brilliant dark focus of your eyes on the distant miracle playing out below where we stand.. I can see the wonderment and the swelling of all the big feelings filling you up... I see the way your breath is catching and the blood rushing below your freckled skin.
You brush a bead of sweat from your forehead with the back of a sand covered hand, leaving a rust brown smudge above your eye. Your hair is a disarray and wild and some sticks slick on your cheek. I see all this, but what I notice is the smile that does not come to your lips. The joy is too deep for such a superficial showing, the wonderment too encompassing for full comprehension. The impossible age of the earth and the greatness of the expanse presses its weight upon the smallness of us and our short time into our consciousness.
And the lines on your face, the earth on your skin, the sweat that has beaded at your temples - in this moment and in this place - I too am filled with with feelings too big to easily hold. I am struck by the way the magic of you has pressed upon the smallness of my being and my life. I am struck by the way you have carved your own path onto parts of me where no one has before tread. You are etched on my heart through the ebb and flow of our own short seasons.
The sun dips lower and the temperature drops. The smile finally comes you your lips and you turn your shining eyes toward me. We turn and you take my hand. And we walk back to the cabin, our shadows on the dry grass stretched before us.
The Man in the Station
