lucky despairs
I hear the train before I see it. A dark mass flashing with bright white headlights, piercing through the forest thick along the river. A steady iron rumble, the kind of sound I teach people to listen for when they are here.
Not everyone likes to hear it but I love it—this fact that there is something moving steadily toward its destination, capable of carrying its weighty freight such a long way.
*
Lately, if I tell one awful truth I always offer two other things mostly because I feel I should. For example, I might say: We are moving back into our home (great, incredible, beautiful) and it is so much better to be here (great and true and wonderful) but I am in despair (awful and true and difficult to admit).
There are always the people who only acknowledge the great and there are the people who acknowledge the great and the despair. The best people are the ones who do not press me to justify the despair or try to qualify it, who simply hold the fact of its existence with tenderness.