Train to My Heart

“All aboard!” The conductor called, not through an old, static speaker but through the power of man’s voice, from the front-most car of the passenger train. You didn’t find many passenger trains around here anymore; in fact, this was the last railway offering a passenger train in this area.

It was plenty good for my needs though. A little rickety and a good deal noisier than the more advanced forms of transportation nowadays, but it was sufficient for what I was in need of. My parents didn’t exactly have the funds to pay for something more expensively-comfortable – hell, they had barely had enough for my college funds – and I didn’t complain. A three hour trip home from a semester of college on a rickety trip wasn’t a big sacrifice to visit the family that I had been so close with before my departure. They almost felt like strangers now from the desolate, quiet lifestyle I had become accustomed to…But it had been three quiet years since I had made the trip home…

The snow was just beginning to fall at the train station with a weak flutter that made me miss home. We just didn’t get the amount of snow here that I had loved at home. Hell, it had been such a long time since I had been home I could barely remember the blizzards or the sense of hibernation that had often come from cuddling under a blanket with the family on the span of days that school was closed because we couldn’t get out the door. It all seemed like it was in my distant past that had withered away with age, not something that I had deliberately forgotten because of a key component to all of my memories…

I gathered my three bags of luggage that had been cluttering my dorm room and squeezed into the narrow passageway of the train, finding a passenger compartment near the front. There weren’t that many people on the train to complain about a solitary person taking a whole compartment for herself. I liked it that way. No one there to squeeze my elbows into my sides or study me from the other side of the compartment. Especially, there would be no one there to look over my shoulder while I wrote. It wasn’t insecurity, I was proud to be a writer, but I didn’t like showing a person my rough draft of my scattered thoughts and sketchy ideas of flat characters. There was only one person that I had ever opened up enough to let see that, and that person… that person was long gone in my past.

I left the door of my train compartment open. I wasn’t so solitary that I didn’t want others to know I was there! I would let them think what they wanted when they saw me sprawled out over a little notebook; I wasn’t afraid of being “the girl with the notebook”. I had always been that before. Honestly, I liked the sense of humanity that came from being in my own little compartment where no one had to pay attention to me, but I could pay attention to them. Some writers say that they get their inspiration from the weirdest places. Me? I was one of those writers. I eavesdropped better than I carried on my own conversations, and I always remembered fragments of conversations that inspired me to write something. That was what made writing fun: taking an inspiring situation that I had eavesdropped in on and reworking it into some great scene of a novel. Especially during the holidays like this, the things you could hear were endless!

The snow was growing faintly heavier with the departure of the train. Little snowflakes clung to the window in such beautiful patterns. I took a long time looking out the window as the train pulled away from the station, hoping to find some sort of inspiration. I had been struggling with a romance novel idea for some time, but had found quite a depression of writer’s block to it. Romance novels weren’t normally my best genre as of late; I preferred writing about what didn’t refer to my emotions as greatly as this required.
Finding something special in the way that the snowflakes swirled and patterned the window, I grabbed my notebook out of the green, tattered bag that had never left my side since sophomore year. I threw my other luggage bags to the seats across from me and ordered my necessary reference books beside me. For lack of better room, I also piled the stack of college books that had been a growing pile since freshman year close to those. Something within me had found inspiration and I wrote. There was no chronological order to what I had previously written – which had only been “Prologue” thus far – but I was more than I had written since I had started this task of writing something so far out of my comfort zone.

It hadn’t seemed like such a long time, but suddenly the train was screeching to a halt at the first of many stations between home and me. Unrestrained and piled too high, my books toppled over, scattering the floor of the compartment as well as the walkway beyond.
Annoyed at my interruption – as well as embarrassed by the holdup I could cause to the exiting passengers – I threw my notebook across the compartment and got to my knees to clean up. Another pair of hands was already there. A pair of hands was gathering the books in the walkway, somehow guessing my organization of college books and organizing by subject and then alphabetically. The pile of books was pushed into my compartment and I blushed of more embarrassment.

“Thanks,” I muttered, peeking around the corner to catch a glimpse at my helper.

Chocolate brown eyes widened as my own realization hit and I couldn’t pull away from the eyes fast enough.

“Kenah?!” That warm, familiar voice rejoiced.

Uh-oh. James Noble…