Trains + Fire + Pills
In June, I’m not feeling well but I plant seeds and bulbs anyway. What I mean to say is, I plant seeds though I’m not confident in my ability to grow them. I watch for signs of growth despite feeling stuck. I boil kettles of water and pour them on anthills in my driveway, watching the bugs scatter and die like biblical ruin; smoldering has-beens. What I mean to say is, I destroyed them for my own convenience. I journal on my porch looking for the solar eclipse but see nothing. Astrologers see eclipses as portals. Some say their chaotic energy is too much, and some say if you harness the chaos you’ll climb higher than you thought possible. If you can’t, you’ll move backward, fall farther than you imagined. It’s also why people cycle back into your life during eclipse season. Amid this uncertain energy, I visit my friends who had children during the pandemic and hold and kiss their babies for the first time ever. I reach through the holes in the glass lattice of parenthood to touch them and their families now. I weed my garden, unsure if I’m pulling flowers or weeds sometimes, but the pulling feels good.
From my garden, I can hear the trains that pass through Utica. I didn’t realize that I’d bought a house near a train until the first night. My family has always lived near trains, and the sound is a gateway to my kin, to memories. What I mean to say is, the sound is familiar—trains were some of the first sounds I learned, and I watched my niece and nephew learn them too as we sat in my parents’ house, and my mother asked them if they heard the train. I wondered if it was one of the first sounds my mother learned. If my grandmama taught her not to be afraid. I mean afraid, because the tracks ran practically through the yard. She grew up no more than a few feet away from The Cotton Belt rail line, which became the Southern Pacific, then the Union Pacific in 1996. Whenever we visited Arkansas, the train passed through many times a day, blowing its horn coming and going, even in the small hours of the morning. It started with the window panes quaking in their frames even though the train was still a mile away. My brother and I would share a high, sturdy bed in the front room as children; the mattress so weak we rolled to the middle and kicked and scratched one another in our sleep. We would get loaded down with quilts so heavy it felt like sleeping underwater. I still remember the lights of the train passing through the front windows over our bodies like a prayer. Sometimes, I slept with my mother and grandmama in her bed after granddaddy was gone. Grandmama slept through every train but woke up multiple times in the night to tend to the fire.
The house fire started in the chimney. My grandmama, a dedicated fire mage, had a fire every day of her life in her fireplace, even in the summer. I don’t know if it was leftover behavior from cooking over a fire as a child, or it was an ingrained idea as part of rural living, that always having fire around is useful. When the trains woke me, I would tiptoe up to the night fire, gleaming like an eye in the dark. The fireplace faced the train tracks. On the chimney, a portrait of my grandmama’s mama, Josephine. Sometimes I looked at Josie.
The night my grandmama’s house caught on fire, I took pills. I was only 11 years old, but my friend and I had decided to take her Ritalin and stay up all night. We watched movies and giggled, and cut out paper snowflakes for hours and hours and hours. We covered every inch of the kitchen with construction paper. We didn’t know exactly that we were experimenting or recreating with drugs, but because we did it in secret, we had a feeling it wasn’t something we ought to do.
I’ve always been interested in pills. We rarely had sweets in the house when I was growing up and pills looked eerily close to candy; light pinks, reds, yellows. Some of the medicine I took as a child tasted like it too. I used to take my father’s dopp kit down from its shelf and look through the blister packs. I took blister packs of some pills and cough drops and hid them in my closet. I would take them down to look at them. I ate the cough drops on the wood floor next to my shoes and dolls. Impatient, I crunched on them; their strong menthol made me feel like a dragon breathing fire through my nose. Slightly painful, but exhilarating. Pills made me cry. This was part of the fascination too, pills did something magic. They can lift you out of your life, put you on a path to healing, a path to no pain. They can eclipse the conscious self and put you on a path to sensation, a path to numb, a portal to a distant state. A portal to addiction. I eventually returned the other packs of pills without taking any and told my mother I could reach all the medication. She relocated it to another shelf and told me never to take any pill that wasn’t directly given to me.
This is how I knew what I did at my friend’s house was wrong. I can’t remember her reaction when I told her about the pills, but I confessed after she told my brother and me that grandmama’s house burned to the ground. My grandmama was safe, and had gotten most of her things out, but in my mind, because I had taken the pills, the house had caught on fire, or because the house had caught on fire, I took the pills. The events connected. Melted together. Bad things had happened all within the span of a few hours. I had hurt everyone and so had the fire. Me and the fire, we grew and ravaged structures in the middle of the night when no one was looking. Me and this fire were dangerous. A double dagger cutting my mother on the same night. I cried and slunk in my seat. For the house, for the pills, for things you can’t undo. You can’t unburn a house, you can’t untake a pill.
What I mean to say is, when I hear a train while I’m weeding, I think of my grandmama, and I think of her house, and I think of windows shaking and sometimes I think of the pills. All the thoughts connected, linked—what I mean to say is I’ve tried to write about this fire before, and these pills before and this train before, and it’s been difficult. All the threads lead back to parts of myself I don’t like very much but are very real. The deluded, destructive, obsessive, escapist, sensation-seeking, well-meaning but death-eating parts of me. As an anxious child, I sometimes cried at night because I didn’t think I was a good enough person. I wanted to evolve past the deeply flawed and human parts of me. I will never be able to. I can only know those flaws more intimately, attempt to tame them. There’s no clear division in me, no clear place where the good and bad things don’t touch. Me, trying to understand the things I do, like when you stare at something for so long you fall backward before you fall forward.
