Figure in the Lighted Window
July 10, 2020
As a child of about six or seven, I can remember sitting by the window on the train on one of our trips to Georgia, one of those slow freight trains with a few passenger cars tacked on the end that seemed to stop in every tiny town. It was nighttime and the train had stopped in a town in South Carolina, maybe Dillon, maybe Florence, maybe Kingstree.
Looking out into the dark of the town, I caught sight of a figure in a lighted window on a second floor of one of the buildings. I leaned into the train window to try to see more clearly into that world. The figure moved about in the room, doing something rather briskly, something he maybe did every night at this time, living out his life story there in this place where the train had stopped momentarily.
Suddenly, I longed to know that life inside the lighted window, who that man was, what he was doing and thinking and feeling, and as I stared at his outline in the window, I knew, just as suddenly, that I never would. I would never know his story and he would never know mine. I felt a pang of grief, a pain of separateness.
The train pulled out of the station. The image of that figure in the lighted window, a world apart and unreachable, is forever imprinted in my memory, somehow sorrowful and beautiful at the same time.
I let myself settle into that familiar clack, clack, clack of the train as it built up speed and headed away from this dark place and closer to Georgia, a world I knew and loved, where I was known and loved, a world I could touch, full of people made of flesh and blood, not shadows and light.
©2021 Joy Cunningham