My own life teems with elements of fiction that don't quite come together in a satisfying way—the closer they get the more I demand, and maybe it's a subconscious rule that we constantly adjust these self-imposed benchmarks so we never reach the ideal of a full and poetic control over what happens to us and what we offer ourselves up to.
There's so much I want to possess. My perception of the world's immensity shrinks and expands as I navigate it, but it escapes my grasp completely when I confront the sheer vastness of human stories I'll never know.
On trains I lose any tenuous strings that tether to reality. I spent two groundless weeks some summers ago racing through little towns populated with a million little people who have lives as complex and vivid as mine, people with hopes and dreams and ambitions and friends and happinesses and craziness/es, stories that unraveled all around me and stories that went on in spite of me, stories in which I was just a random passerby. Something to color the background. And I became really sad then, saying lightning-fast hellos and goodbyes to things I won't ever be a part of, really beautiful people who are nothing more to me now than overheard conversations in a coffee shop, or a memory of a window lighting on at dusk. I don’t think I’ll ever stop wanting everything.
