But I’d trade it all for the highway instead.
I should likely start thinking of titles for these blog posts. When I roll over to squarespace it‘ll require them. I don’t love that exactly, these aren’t novels or albums and being forced to do soemthing new by formatting feels a bit too much like homework. I wrote the title for this post before I wrote the post itself based on the image. I took it today as Abby and I drove alongside an Amtrak train on our way to a café.
When we got there I ran into a friend of mine from college. He likes trains more than anybody else I know. He talked about potentially buying an old railcar and fixing it up into a house. Some of them have 18‘ ceilings. Of course the way our rails are nowadays it’d be prohibitively expensive to use it as an actual moving home, and that makes me kind of sad.
He wanted to do it as a project to distract himself from the anguish of a breakup he’s been going through. Maybe I don’t have enough friends, maybe I’m too selfish, but if Abby broke up with me I’d get the hell out of dodge. Maybe to India or to Madrid or Italy or southern France, that’s what I always told myself anyways.
There’s the old bite of wisdom: wherever you go, there you are. That may be true, but I think if I went through a change like that I’d lean into it in a place where I could wear shorts in January. All without seeing anybody that reminded me of what I had lost or moved on from.
Of course that was then, and here we are...now. A breakup with Abby would be something cataclysmic. Something Old Testament, something I don’t even really want to think much about, let alone write about.
This friend, his ex-partner and I had all discussed trying to get land together a few years ago. It didn’t work out but it is startling to think about how much has changed for the both of us in that time. Abby and I have Roby for starters.
