Doctor said I've got Eurostar Magic

Foray 017: Why the best things in life make no sense

My hair is sitting on my sweater, soaked and unbrushed, I have a painting strapped to my chest like a baby bjorn and three full-sized suitcases, without a single working wheel between them, grasped in my hand. As the line slowly trundles on, I become increasingly cognizant that I smell like wet wool and there is nothing I can do about it.

Today is a very good day. A great day in fact. Perhaps the best day in awhile.

An out-of-character bout of insomnia which has plagued me for the last two months was dispelled last night by a decade old bottle of red wine, shared with my best friend. It is nice to know the old medicines still work.

It is nice to know that my favourite things are still magic. It is nice to know that the Eurostar, no matter how many times I take it or whatever state I board it in, no matter the baggage I hold in my hand or in my heart, that the Eurostar will still whisk me away, fresh and new, back home.

Despite my best efforts and my built-in aversion to neon, I can’t help but glance back once more before I board, suitcases straining my wrists, to take in the Tracy Emin installation above the train tracks.

“I want my time with you.”

My best friend asked me two nights ago if I was very sad. If I naturally leaned towards sadness, if I found sad music or films could afflict me with the emotion as if it was the common cold. I thought about it for a moment. I don’t feel very sad, I said. I always say I am happy but it’s not happiness that I resonate most with in art and culture. I don’t consume joy for the sake of it.

No, it’s that tired answer again. The inbetweenness, the melancholy, nostalgia. Anything that shys away from direct light, anything that can settle over the bones like a blanket. I have a nose for it and a taste for it, seeking it out like a bloodhound on a hunt.

Suitcases shuffled into their slots, seat found, I sit and take stock of the situation. My AirPods are out of battery (I haven’t had a charger in days) and I know my blue pen is running out of ink. But this is the Eurostar. And on the Eurostar I need to do three things. I need to listen to my “Blue Rain, Orange Sun” playlist, I need to write in my journal and I need to stare out the window, hypnotically and for long stretches of time, at the country villages we pass.

Substitutions and slapdash provisions are my two favourite things. Pen drawing transparent, pencil appears, and I realise if I play music out loud on my phone and bring it to my ear like I’m taking a call, then no one else can hear it except me. I buy a coffee with bills instead of Apple Pay and find I have exact change.

The Eurostar is magic. That I promise you.

There is nothing so chic, so worthy of thought or writing as the Eurostar. I have it all memorized. The hills of Amiens and the cliffs of Devon. The rivers we pass. A kind of physical reflex, I sit and wait in anticipation, knowing something is nearing. Straining to see if the red and blue riverboats that were there last time are still anchored to the banks, that the strange shapes drawn into the green grass hills right before going under the tunnel still exist. That Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan still sound the same. That writing is suddenly so much easier, so wanted and smooth, coming out from my fingers with the same speed and current as the train hurtling along the tracks.

The Eurostar is magic. It always will be. Not every train, certainly not every plane, but the Eurostar, the Eurostar is it’s own two and a half hour world.

I enter this world every so often. A good pattern of to-ing and fro-ing when I went to university in London and would run back on the weekends home to Paris, taking in my breaks, needing a breath of fresh air. I’ve sat in these seats and had revelations, been stilled with the feeling of great anxiety or despair, waiting for what I had left behind to curdle or seeing if a new thing was in the air.

This world is different from any other. Not French nor English, marked by movement and the promiscuous promise of ease. An assurance that your bag will not be checked for liquids and most oversized loads can be gotten away with. A penchant for turning a blind eye. A hand roving across the page.

I still can’t get over it.

The train moves so fast, I can see it in the farming villages and church spires that flash through the foliage before folding back out of sight. I can feel it in my hand, spidering across the keyboard and through the pen. Why is it that writing feel so good, so natural, so easy on the train?

I promise myself that when I make more money, when all of this amounts to something, I will take trains everyday. I picture it as my perfect writing routine. Take a train two hours out, scenery, movement, a chapter done. Have lunch at some local village and then take it back, the same route or different, something that doesn’t have too many changes or false starts, all the way back home. Writing as the sky darkens, finishing just as we pull into the station.

There are so many little worlds. So many exist yet so few entertain them. Bookended by abrupt stops, subsumed by the sea, I remember everything on the Eurostar. Things I thought of here and then never again. Like smoking weed or the scent of certain days, some thoughts and memories are not yours and yours alone but belong to somewhere else. A limited third party. Archived and attached to that sensation, that movement or place, only accessible when visited.

Life is linear but magic is not.

I like that you can’t find it. You can’t call it into existence like muscles through exercise or peace through sleep. It is there and then it’s not, you had it - a brief flash of your grandparents through your childhood eyes - then it’s gone and here you are. Same seat, same person, same hair and yet totally, totally different.

And still, it will come back to us. Touchstones when you need them. Moments you forgot about and journeys you took so long ago, springing on you like a surprise attack. We are so good at forgetting the forests they hide in and the tracks they leave yet we will inevitably, thankfully, cross into their territory again.

Being brought into the other dimension, that extra extra destination. Different points of departure, wide array of arrivals. Pocketing your irritation, opening to the pure sensation, holding onto each life like luggage along the wrist. Bear this load for nothing? No, no something must come out of it.

A ticket or a pass.

I just live, moving forward, waiting to fall into a pothole; a portal. Unseen, unsung. Back to something I had forgotten to remember.

Back to something I forgot.