Endless autumn train tracks – all these great abandoned houses and their fallow fields.

You get used to it. The endless hours. The blur of yellowing

Trees, and time, and bridges. Every two-exit town looks the same,

Toothpick diorama of a farm. What am I supposed to learn about life

Here, amid all the loneliness? Perhaps the elegance of a withering

Willow by the bridge. To be alone but not hollow, solitary but not lost.

You’re a hard friend to make and harder to keep, and I’m starting to think

That maybe you’re not worth keeping. In the grass, the implication

Of a body. In the car, the ghost of a great-

Aunt’s mediocre love. I’m not sorry for wanting

You to kiss me in the bathroom hallway but I’m sorry

That it didn’t happen before our friends came through the door.

Tomorrow I’ll be another mistake

You won’t own up to. I’ve already made a life of sitting

With my hunger and waiting for it to leave. It’s just this time

The object left first –

Blurry face in a greasy train window,

Home on the platform, trying to breathe through the smoke.

– June Lin

Author’s Note: “now boarding” is one of a series of pieces I wrote while taking the train back and forth between my university and my hometown. There’s a certain sense of loneliness, I think, to taking the train alone. Looking out the window. Watching these towns you know nothing about flicker by through the glass. That’s magnified by the feeling of leaving home and going somewhere that your mother will never understand. And I find it great for my writing, being forced to really sit there with yourself. This piece is a bit about that loneliness, a bit about leaving people behind, a bit about being left.