He’s naught but a fool for not knowing how to tie a knot, but it’s also not for nothing.
This sentence may or may not be true for the person it describes.
And honestly, I like it better than, “It’s naught but a knot, but that’s not for nothing,” even though I think this one makes you think a little more. It also rolls off the tongue slightly better.
There’s the horn in the distance. We’ve been sitting here in the rocks and dirty, just waiting for it. It’s quickly followed by the harsh whir of an engine, getting louder as it gets closer.
The train is coming. A wave of relief flows over me, as if deep down I thought it might never arrive. It would forget to come down this track, and leave us stranded. A look to my left lets me know that he was thinking the same thing.
We stand up, wiping the gravel from the back of our pants and putting our backpacks on our backs. It’s all we have left in the world. Our clothes and our bags. And each other.
Any moment that train should be coming around the bend. We’ve been mentally preparing for this moment, but it’s still pretty jarring. I’m beginning to think there’s no way to really know how you’ll feel in the face of this. Freedom. This is freedom. Almost. It will be when we see the train. It will be when we’re on it.
There it is. It’s not glamorous, it’s not beautiful. But it’s there. It’s within our reach.
We turn and start jogging away from the train coming toward us, building up speed to match the train. It’s not moving nearly as fast as we’d imagined it would. It must be carrying some incredible weight. That’s okay, though. It’ll work in our favor. We’ve never done this before, and anything help in our court will be welcomed with open arms.
There it is, next to us. It’s going past us. We have to catch it.
“Go, go, go…” I say under my breath, maybe to myself, maybe to no one.
He jumps. I jump.
Badge by: Doobster @ Mindful Digressions
This is a part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday, hosted by LindaGHill:
Prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: acquaint and/or friend.
What does it really mean to be a friend? As short as twenty years ago, it wasn’t a hard word to define. You had best friends, you had friends, you had acquaintances. Or so I’ve been told.
Now, there are not only so many types of friends (Facebook friends, twitter friends, video game friends, online friends (who may or may not fall into any of the previous categories), etc.), no one uses the word acquaintance anymore. How many of the people you’re ‘friends’ with in really life are your actual friends? Sometimes the people I spend time with playing video games with seem like better friends to me than the people I’ll hang out with at the bar. It’s not true for all of my friends, but for some.
And what about all of those so-called Facebook friends? On the other end of the spectrum, I know I have friends on there that are people I knew in high school from across the room from some class I barely remember the details of. People I wasn’t actually friends with when I was there, and people I most likely will never want to catch up with. I hated high school. I find that’s usually true of people who don’t mind real life. I don’t mind it.
I guess what I’m saying is that the definition for ‘friends’ has become a bit blurry, and I can’t remember the last time I had a set definition for who in my life the term actually referred to, if I ever did.
To put it into perspective, I think the word ‘friend’ has come to mean so little (or too many things, depending on how you look at it), that even though I like to think my grammar and spelling is generally on par without the need for spell check, is still had to correct myself from typing ‘freind’ more than once.
P.S. On a completely unrelated note, can someone let me know how the background looks to them? It looks pretty good to me, but I’m pretty sure the box is going to shift for someone with a different sized screen…
Box the Stars 