and still I love trains

There's freedom, sweet freedom, in coming back a day after Shaffer and SW leave for the training in Anqing. Freedom and do I actually prefer dirty public transportation to the straight tree-lined highways that fly by in the car? Whatever the reason, there's exhilaration in a trip to make on my own.

At 7:40 on Monday morning I realize there's a bus at 8:00 that I won't make. I could take late morning or the afternoon one, but I'd prefer to spend the day at the office where at least the windows will guaranteed be open to the gorgeous weather. So it's the 2:26 am train. When it turns out they only have hard seats I buy the ticket anyway. It was one of seven left.

I only half-way unpack and repack my dirty pink traveling handbag (instant coffee packets and roll of toilet paper stay indefinitely at the bottom) and with it swung over my shoulder and marching down the street I suddenly feel as if I was born for this. Trains and traveling light and half days at home. I wonder again how I can make it my job.

The best baozi in the world for lunch, pipa from the street, and still cheaper than those crappy plastic-encased boxed lunches. More freedom breathed.

I sleep 'til 1:15 then wait for almost half-an-hour for the middle-of-the-night bus, along with two worker guys also going to the train station. They got dropped off by two other guys on scooters who raced away after checking the bus stop sign to make sure it went to the train station. The time was close. I counted down bus stops, and at every one debated getting off and hailing a taxi. In the end I rode all the way to the train station, and arrived with ten minutes to spare. I ran through the gate in my waiting hall, but got stopped by a train station attendant. The train, which was coming from Shanghai, hadn't arrived yet; all the other passengers were still there in the seats.

A mother and daughter pair without seat tickets were asleep in my seat. They muttered about how they couldn't believe so many ticket slots were held for Nanjing. "Like this is a big place!" they said, more in gentle confusion than real disdain. I felt bad for making them wake up and move. The daughter made the mother take the seat, and when the other guy arrived for the seat beside me, the people across the aisle scooted over to give the mother a place, making it four to a three-person seat. I actually had the aisle-seat ticket and the guy the window-seat ticket, but by the time he got there I was already settled in, not about to volunteer to trade, and he didn't ask.

I slept decently, with my bag as a pillow on the table, and nestled in the corner. A male and female across from us, college students, not together. The intimacy of strangers, the way we move together. She stretches her legs out, I push mine between them and under her seat. When it's four o'clock in the morning, it doesn't matter how our knees are resting against the other's. In 2006 on a greyhound bus near Chicago, it was also past midnight when we settled into our seats. The sweet-faced teenager told me where he was going, and why. I've forgotten now, but I remember how he slept on my shoulder, and how I smiled in the night.