James Frazier-Wilson
It is nighttime, at the train station, a faded facade of concrete and metal. I can tell where the paint used to be bright, where the grimy steps used to be clean, what the stony pillars looked like before they were cluttered with missing posters and advertisements for yoga classes. It is ugly and foreign, but I feel lighter than the air which rips past me cruelly, slicing my exposed arms and cheeks. Michael is standing beside me. He is wearing my yellow sweater – this is all the sunlight I need.
It is nighttime, in Minneapolis, and my mother is singing my brother and I to sleep. What she sings is a sad song, but we do not know it. It is called “Delta Dawn,” and it is about a woman who never got over her first love, who roams like a tumbleweed with her suitcase in hand, afraid to settle down. There is a tragedy to it that we do not realize – the two of us, though we are growing like fragrant weeds, might as well have been born yesterday as we lie, tucked in bunk beds, nestled between blankets and rowdy piles of stuffed animals, our eyes closed and our ears to the sky. We are sailors through the cosmos, surrounded by stars, sprinkled with comet-dust and tethered to Earth by her voice. I think to myself that if I were to reach out my hand, I could cup the world.
A train brakes, and the platform fills again. Not ours. I shrug up my hood as the robotic voice calls out the arrivals. Purple Line. Davis. And finally, the much dreaded 15 Minute Delay. The people are carrying suitcases and skateboards and sandwiches. They shuffle around us decisively, making their way up and down the stairs, chasing the next stop on their endless journeys. As they pass, the darkness begins to creep across the concrete floor towards our planted feet. Michael and I do not know where we are going – we have an idea, but it is fledgeling, trifling, subject to change. We know nothing of train systems, or relationships, or life. I have had no revelations, only revolutions. I am prepared to circle the drain once again, if he will ask it of me, I am prepared to drive the knife into my chest. Our ride is late, the night is getting later, and for once, there are no words I can say which will fix things – but for a moment, he slips his hand in mine, and we embrace, and there is one last bastion of light in the endless blackness.
My mother was never a skilled singer. She had no training, nor experience, and she was raised in the tradition of silent burdens, not joyful calls. Yet, she looks down at her children and finds joy in the darkness which invades her life. She had never imagined that she could create something beautiful, yet here we are, two curled, stubby, forms, rolling and yawning on the bed next to her. She sings as clearly as she can. Her words do not move past my slumbering ears, but I hear her. She is saying that she will be our lifeboat and our lighthouse and our locket, that she will be the stone hearth which keeps us warm on frigid nights.
Michael’s breath is warm against my neck. He exhales slowly, coloring the frigid air with steam. The barking of a dog, the distorted sounds of music escaping a car window, and then silence. I think that, in a city so large, there must be a million people living and crumbling and burning just like we are. I think there must have been a million people who have boarded trains and not known exactly where they would end up. Hyde Park or Bridgeport or Douglas. The city enfolds around us, and he looks up at me, wobbling, blue, and hopeful. I absorb him, and there is nothing else in the world, nothing but his voice and his hands and his hair. And I refuse to look directly at the memory in my mind’s eye, because I am scared that if I hold it out in front of me it will break like marbles spilling on a wooden floor.
My mother sings to me. The wind outside withers softly at the sound. It is only her voice and her hands and her hair, and the entire universe subsides gently, like the pause before a breath is released.
James Frazier-Wilson is a current first-year in Medill studying Journalism and Creative Writing. He loves to play tennis and watch bad horror movies and is currently on a mission to try every Italian restaurant in Evanston.
