On the way to the funeral, I listen to a song I haven’t listened to in years. The last time was at the concert, the one we both went to while our parents waited for us in an Indian restaurant a mile away. I wonder if you’ve listened to the song lately, whether it reminds you of that or whether it reminds you of your mother. 

The train attendant has a limp—she holds the seats as she walks past. She says she’s been working the little shuttle for twenty years, loping up and down its creaky length. I hadn’t even known that the shuttle was twenty years old—but maybe that’s not what she meant. Maybe she’s been up and down different shuttles for twenty years and they all look the same from the inside, the same cracked seat covers and peeling rusty paint on the walls. Maybe she’s been holding onto those seats with a claw-like grip from New Jersey down to Utah. 

The three people at the train station are wearing Adidas shoes, which makes me feel connected to them. This tall man and this short woman. Our shoes, standing in a line, saying many things about us but also nothing at all. I think his soles look more worn, and the whiteness of her stripes is almost shiny. I look down at my battered blue suede that never quite recovered from that one party. We stand at a considerate distance, though I am a little closer to the woman. So it goes. The trains go by so fast that they whistle, rocking just a little bit at the force of their own velocity. The station is cold and empty, but well-lit. I am going home for a funeral and the station is emptier than it is just before a break. Just me and the Adidas shoe-wearers, the middle aged commuters making their way back to their houses. It’s cold and I wish it wasn’t because everything seems to be matching my grief. I am writing this with my notebook balanced on the rail behind the platform and  I don’t want to talk about the person whom I’ve lost. 

Partly because her loss is not all mine, and I want to respect the people for which her loss is infinitely more devastating. Partly because she was a private person. Partly because it doesn’t matter, does it? It doesn’t matter who died—they keep on dying anyway. Regardless of how much you love them. Loved them. 

To tell you the truth, it has been a disastrous year. It has been a no-good, very bad year. Mostly because the people I love have been unimaginably hurt, and I have slipped quietly through the turnstiles without notice. I do not know at all how to help them. I do not know what to do with all of this hurting. 

The service is beautiful. Nobody is dressed in black, and the pews are full. The pastor stands in a beam of light as he prays and it makes the silver in his hair glow. My mother reads a poem— many people read poems, because she loved poems. I am wearing a beige sweater and I sent a picture of it to my friend beforehand because neither of us know what to wear on such an occasion. We are lucky that way. Very many people say how much they loved this person because it’s true, she was wonderful and kind and it’s always the people who are wonderful and kind who die too soon. My old piano teacher plays Gymnopedie no.3, and I know when I’m sitting there in the pew and trying not to wipe my nose with my sleeve because I forgot tissues that for the rest of my life, I will hear this song and think of her. It has been a no-good, very bad year. I missed someone else’s service, or maybe I just didn’t go. I can’t remember where I was. I can’t remember what could have been more important. I should have just gotten on the plane. 

The dining hall is crowded. It’s Indian night, so faint sounds of Bollywood music are drifting in from the kitchen. My friend and I are crying, our shoulders against the wall. Hoping, I suppose, that no one we know will see us or if they do, that they will have the decency to look away. We compare grief attacks; mine in the middle of a crowded club succession planning meeting and his in the middle of a presentation. He is better at telling stories than I am. My grief ties my tongue. It makes me incapable of much more than sitting on a bench outside my dorm and crying, my hand curled around a mini cupcake. We agree on one thing—that it’s ridiculous, all of this. All this missing. In Persian we say delam tangete. My heart is tight in your absence. 

These are my paranoid thoughts: I promise I am trying to find things to be grateful for. I promise I know this isn’t all about me. I get the window seat to the only empty aisle on the plane. The air smells stale. I eat a crepe and watch pirated episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s travel show on my laptop. I pirated enough episodes to keep me from worrying about missing the airport train. Or how I’m going to eat, or when exactly my parents will pick me up, or whether there’s a shuttle I’m going to miss, somehow, somewhere, which will make me irreversibly too late to go home. Since when was I old enough to be at the airport alone? 

I walk to the farm down the road because my mother needs eggs to make dinner. My cat tries to follow me there, but the loose rocks of the dirt road hurt his feet. He stops and watches me walk away, not following, not returning either. I carry him all the way back to our soft lawn before setting off again. The sunset still sets mostly pink over the fields and the cows that dot them. The farm dogs still try to imprint their muddy paws onto my jacket. The little refrigerators inside the farm stand still smell slightly of manure. I have known the owner since I was seven—she still remembers my name. Asks me how college is going. I remember her husband as mostly tall and quiet and happy. Now it’s only her, and the dogs, and the fields that stretch out to the road on the other side of the horse farm. I tell her college is busy, which is not a lie. I do not tell the truth, which is that I am sad. I get two cartons of eggs and wave back at my neighbor’s in their car as they come rumbling down the hill. The sunset filters through the windows of the kitchen and makes the wood look like honey. 

The service was beautiful, and my parents drove me to the airport even though they said their friends were going to do it. I am at college, and I am not yet close enough to anyone to want to talk about this. I am in a deserted train station, eating from a bag of pomegranate seeds that my mother separated from the shell for me. I am reading a book. The woman who stands at the next pillar over meets my eyes when I look up. She is wearing a big coat and a hat with flaps over her ears. She sways slightly from side to side. “Don’t read here in the dark. It’ll hurt your eyes.” She tells me. Everything is strange—the flickering lights of the station, the honor system at the farmstand, the hot water bottles my mother has been carrying around like it’s her child. And I’m pretty sure the pomegranates are staining my teeth. I get on the train—and after you make that decision, you can no longer get off the train and step into your childhood bedroom and stay there forever and ever.

I am mourning—I am in mourning; I am trying to train my heart to expand a little again. I am trying to get past some abstract ideal of an adult life that let me down many years ago and is letting me down even harder now. I won’t cry on the bench again. Progress, I suppose. But on the way back from the funeral I listened to a song I haven’t listened to in years. 

I get back on the fucking train.