Ghost Trains

This story was submitted for the Vocal #200 challenge, inviting creators to discuss their writing aspirations for 2024.

Matt doesn’t know my humiliating secret: that I want to be a writer too.

I’ve told him only that I enjoy writing, but that I’m not very good at it, and that the closest I get to writing is my lifelong habit of scribbling in my journals. He doesn’t know how much I adored seeing his shelf stacked with dozens of moleskin notebooks, years written on the spines in white sharpie. Like finding someone who speaks my language in a foreign country.

He doesn’t know that I’ve always wanted to take a creative writing course. How I’ve researched it, but could never justify the time commitment or the expense. He doesn’t know how much I regret wasting my communications degree working for a financial company. He doesn’t know I have a Vocal+ membership, or that I wrote a fiction story for a Vocal challenge last year.

Matt doesn’t know how many stories I’ve started writing over the years, a few paragraphs here and there, never fleshed out. They are stored on several decades of laptops, flash drives, even floppy disks from high school. He doesn’t know that the notes app on my phone is full of story ideas and essay titles, that there are always narratives floating around in my head. How moments of my day build into frames and outlines.

He doesn’t know that I once told my previous ex I wanted to give writing a serious try, and he told me he didn’t think I was good enough.

Matt doesn’t know how much he inspires me. I’ve surely told him how much I enjoy his work, but I haven’t told him that each time I finish reading one of his stories I am filled with ever more awe of him. He doesn’t know that a large part of my attraction to him is his skill with words, his discipline to complete his articles and stories, and his courage to keep submitting his work. The barrel is deep of things to love about him beyond his linguistic talent, but it adds a formative layer to my infatuation. It enchants me, the idea of being in love with someone who identifies as a writer.

He doesn’t know that two weeks ago after I spent the morning reading his latest Substack dispatch, (a story he’d written for publication but which was turned down for it’s length) how it resonated and spun around in my head, burning within me an urgency to write while I walked around in downtown Seattle noticing the stories unfolding all around me. He doesn’t know how this propelled me to write an essay that evening, one that I’m proud of, that I hoped to have the courage to share with him one day.

He can’t possibly know, then, the gravity of consolation that comes from receiving his text: “I wanted to tell you how good your writing was in some of those texts from Tuesday. The freight train line I’m still thinking about.”

It’s been a week now since I last saw him, feeling the disconnect between us, a gnawing tension replacing what had previously been a neverending strand of smiles. The dreaded phone call came the next day, setting off a series of texts as I processed the understanding that he no longer wanted me/us/this. For me it was nothing short of derailment.

A few months ago his appearance in my life felt abrupt and intense- I was enthralled and bewildered by his existence, our chemistry, our connection. Lying in bed with my head on his chest I told him it felt like he’d entered my life like a freight train. In my journal I wrote that I felt he was barreling down the tracks I was tied to, a gigantic unstoppable force. I wanted to take things slow, but it did not seem possible. Knowing him left me wide eyed, a doe in the headlights of his affection.

But then it was over, just as abruptly, and the idea of a freight train still applied, still danced in my head. In my grief I typed “you came into my life bewildering me, and you’re leaving me bewildering me. You came into my life like a freight train, and you’re leaving me that way too. It’s fitting really.” To know he thought about these words days later is a kindness, a solace.

Cheryl Strayed once wrote that our unlived lives are ghost ships that didn’t carry us, and there’s nothing to do but salute them from the shore. I think of that line often, especially lately. Ghost ships. I see Matt now as a ghost train, a specter I can faintly feel rumbling past. A distant whistle signaling he’s left my station and I wasn’t meant to board. Nothing to do but wave farewell from the platform.

Maybe things happen for a reason, or maybe we just want them to, to help us make sense and order out of senselessness and disorder. What reason then could I give myself for falling in love with a writer who couldn’t love me back? It creates meaning to say he’s spurred in me something beyond just heartache, some small confidence that I can and should write somewhere other than my journals. To justify that the pain is a fair trade for a fire finally being lit beneath me to take up the pen. That in the practice of creating and submitting work on this platform, I might become a better writer, and I might prove something to myself. I plan to write new content and submit it once a week until my Vocal+ membership ends. I am the conductor of my own train, and I’ll get this one on the right track.

Matt could not know how validating it was for me to hear him compliment my writing. But I’m choosing to accept the compliment, channel my grief into action, and let his brief presence in my life be the inspiration I’ve been avoiding. I’m ready to write.