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The Garbage Train



The garbage train scares everybody. It moves too slowly and quietly. "It's like a ghost train," my ex-boyfriend told me, when I confessed to him that I was afraid of it, that it gave me chills and made my nipples hard when it passed me at night as I waited alone on the platform. "It's like a view from the past. They're all just these old trains. So weird and old, and now they pick up garbage."

At this point, we are not even waiting for a train. We're in his tiny, dimly lit room, under the comforter, naked. We have just had sex. We've been broken up for four months, which is almost as long as we were together.

The garbage train is scary perhaps because it does call to mind the past, and because it moves. It's a train coming from the past. It's a train coming straight from the past to remove our present garbage. Seeing it is like visiting a nursing home and looking into the sad and impotent eyes of the people whose world we've inherited and who we now keep as we keep flowers, in sterile, not-aesthetically-unpleasing utilitarian pots. Serviceable, like the garbage train is serviceable.

But what of lost love? I ask him, changing the subject. Did we ever really have it? He honestly doesn't remember, and neither do I. We notice that it's lateÐvery late, fourÐand we begin to dress. He puts on his shoes and his coat, because it is our custom for him to walk me to the train and wait with me for it to arrive. I always appreciated that. Before, I'd rail against the condescension of that thing called chivalry, meaningless empty gestures meant to keep me prim and tiny and helpless as a fainting petticoat priss in the 19th century. But, I find this little effort touching from him. He's younger than me, and I find that touching too. When I was eight months old, he was a helpless newborn. I like to imagine us thenÐthough of course, we did not know each other. My mother tells me I was talking already at eight months, but I did not have teeth. I could have protected him with words, then. Fought off the taunters, even if they only exist in my mind. So does all of this. Back then, I bet I was bigger than him, even. Though probably not by much.

As we wait, the garbage train creeps on by and I am shaken and so is he. I hate how it is painted a garish yellow, sloppily. As though it were bad long ago and now it is being punished, like Cain, to forever wander the subterranean tracks and be reviled. Everyone else who is waiting for the train seems ill at ease, too. To see a crowd stare at a garbage train is not dissimilar to seeing a crowd stare at a public rape. Perhaps not that violentÐmore similar to seeing a crowd watch a homeless man have a seizure on the train platform. Cautious interest. Fear. Pity. Waiting.

Every system has to have a garbage train. I tell him this as we watch the tail end of it, which is not a car but some sort of gigantic, terrifying tool that resembles a wrecking ball. A garbage train: meaning something to crawl around and pick up the refuse and remain as invisible as possible. Bottom-feeders know they strike fear, don't they? "The garbage train of our relationship," I say, pulling a piece of my hair off his coat, "surfaces in the form of your passive-aggressive comments about me fucking all your friends." He rolls his eyes in a way that I know means I am right, but that the analogy is reaching too far and that he finds me ridiculous. "No, really," I insist. It is garbage, my bad behavior. I don't say this, but I mean it. Let it slip between the train and the platform as I have let your bad behavior slip. All your silly breakups, all your stoic "I don't love you"s. This is something better than forgiveness. This is letting go. This is freedom. He rolls his eyes again and crosses his arms. He finds me and my overthinking lame. Truthfully, so do I. I am lame.

I am afraid that I will get picked up by the garbage train. That, I tell him, is the core of my fear. It never stops, but what if one day, it does? What if it stops and the doors open? What then? It's a train with open doors, and I'd be waiting for a train, so of course, I'd walk right in. As if in a trance. I'd feel mean if otherwise, rude and rejecting of something deigning to serve me. Where would the garbage train take me? Where does the garbage get off?

There was a time, I continue, that I would have said you were afraid of the garbage train because it was different and you can't handle novelty. You can't improv. You told me so. You every move is painstakingly memorizedÐI used to look down on that, but in retrospect, I am curiously impressed. I underestimated you, I say, and you respond immediately: "I know." (did you already live out this situation in your mind? Is that how you knew what to say so quickly?) You tell me "I was in gifted classes, you know." I reply: you were? noncommittal, interested. "Well, except for math." I accept this. I know he's smart. I am forever touched and saddened that he's always trying to prove it to me. I say, I couldn't do half of what you do. I lie in bed all day and cry because nothing is the way I need it to be and I can't fix it. You don't have to prove yourself better than this. It's like beating a dead horse. I immediately feel stupid for saying this cliché aloud to him, and I cringe and cover my face. He smiles and reaches out to hug me. He always did accept nearly anything from me, no matter how idiotic. Some people claim to only be able to love those who "call [them] on [their] shit." I am too weak to be called on anything. You know that, I say, despite all my posturing to the contrary. For that, I thank you. I thank you for allowing my shit to remain covert. For allowing my personal garbage train to run silently and at such rare early dawn hours that even nocturnal misfits like me would never, ever witness it in motion.

I tell him, I appreciate that you jump when the garbage train goes by. Not just because it's what I do, too. I get tickled when he is afraid of things of small consequence. Like the time he eeped at a mouse. You are so big, I say, to be afraid of anything. You're a big man, I continue, sort of jokingly. "I'm scared!" he says and I hug his head to my shoulder. I'm wearing five inch platform boots but he still has to lean over quite a bit.

The garbage train scares usÐhim and me and people in generalÐbecause we are afraid of what which reminds us of our mistakes and indiscretions, be they extramarital affairs or aborted fetuses or yesterday's coffee cup. Is the garbage train a vampire that feeds upon not our lifeblood but our vile droppings? Our things that are discarded and useless, already dead? That's even scarier. A grave-robber or a vulture. Either way, anything that travels only by night and doesn't fit in must be up to some mischief.

I like that I feel free to discuss such things with you, I say. We're sitting on the bench now. We've been waiting for my train for a long time. I admit, I tell you, that I once thought you listened to humor me and that the economic trade-off for that was sex. And I was even okay with that, because I am practical and without sentimentality about such matters. But what a cynical thing to think about one of the best people I've ever known. There's more to you than that, I say. He looks at me with anticipation, because he, like me, loves to be flattered. There is more to you than that. You're subtle. You don't merely listen. You reply in like, but I wasn't always hearing you. I expected him to say "water under the bridge," as he is wont to say whenever I bring up any difficulties from the past. He doesn't say it this time, but instead ruffles my hair and nods thoughtfully. Water under the bridge or garbage we thought had slipped away forever, garbage that was supposed to disappear but of which we are reminded whenever our metaphorical garbage train winds snakelike around us as we lie naked on your futon, holding each other, and a piece of old falls off on a sharp turn. And what could we do but stare, because there it is. And we'd say "oh." We pretend to keep moving on, but the thing is, it will never be the same. You can clean a blood-spattered room, but that doesn't make it a room that never housed a murder. All we can do is say "oh." There's a rumble in the distance, and it's my train. I kiss him goodbye, and like every night I do this, I vow to myself that it will be the last time. [an error occurred while processing this directive]