On my drive home from work every night, there is a road I leave my tracks on that has left an imprint on my heart.

It is flawlessly straight and illuminated only by the occasional car lights passing by.   It’s perpendicular to the railroad tracks, which are parallel to the road that carries me the rest of the way home.  It’s only a few blocks from the highway lights, the coffee shops, and the yuppies, but one particular part of the road gives you the serene sensation of being smack dab in the middle of a long, internally adventuresome road trip by yourself.  You feel as though you are in the middle of nowhere and nothing ugly or urbanized can touch you.      

The road is short with little scenery and perhaps uninspiring to most travelers.  To me, though, the road represents being.  Each night, I await this section of my path with anticipation and creep slowly over the asphalt as a calm overwhelms me.  Come to think of it, that’s a perfect portrayal of the emotion the road emits, a paradox.  Isn’t it lovely that calm can overwhelm?      

The first night I noticed this road’s enchantment, I had a rare moment where I needed silence.  The greasy haired boy screaming at me about pain and poetry from my busted car speakers ceased to comfort me, so I thought I’d give talking to God a shot.  That hadn’t worked in ages, either, but I turned my radio all the way down, nonetheless, and slowed my breathing as I eased my pressure on the gas pedal.

That’s when saw the train.  I was no longer breathing slowly; I wasn’t breathing at all.  Neither of my feet was on a pedal and neither of my hands was on the wheel.  I was approaching the edge of the world and nothing mattered but the beauty of the train passing by and the fact that I couldn’t touch it because it wasn’t a part of world I lived in. 

The unattainable is beautiful.  It’s not exclusively beautiful, for there are many attainable things that encompass beauty.  It is the unreachable, still, that holds the maximum amount of splendor.

There is beauty in the striving, however, and that’s why we do it.  That’s why we live, and that’s why we continue to believe that life holds purpose and meaning and poetry and glory and love even when we feel empty and soulless and despondent.  Even when we feel nothing. 

This road is my temple, and I will be forever grateful for the lesson I learned while traveling down it. 

Trinitie