Thank you to those of you who voted for the inspiration for this post! The chosen topic is ‘rust’. I hope you enjoy!
Clouds drifted over the sun. Once more casting the land below into shadow. This had been happening on and off all day. Each time I would shiver and pull my arms in tight. It was summer and warm, but only if you were in direct sunlight. It was chilly everywhere else.
I was walking, as I normally did on a Saturday, to the abandoned train tracks. I was never quite sure why I liked it there. Maybe it was simply a place to go to escape the monotony of my town. Or maybe it was just a place where I could be alone. Or maybe it wasn’t either of those and I had just been doing to for long enough that I’d forgotten why I’d started in the first place. But whatever the reason, every Saturday I would walk the mile or so out of town to the old tracks.
I rarely saw anyone there, and if I did they were always just walking past. They never seemed to notice the tracks and never stopped to look around. But I didn’t mind. I liked it that way.
There were two sets of tracks. One went straight on into the trees and the other curved away towards the old station half a mile away. There weren’t any trains there any more. Bits and pieces of metal that had fallen off trains years ago littered the ground. Small, rugged rocks surrounded the tracks. I loved the way they crunched under my sneakers.
I liked trains, always had. I liked to pick up the pieces of metal, rusted from years of sitting out in the weather, and try to figure out what part of the train they might have belonged to. I liked to think about all the places that piece had been to before it had fallen off here. Even if they’d only been a few places that was sure a lot more than me.
Someone had once told me the reason there were so many scraps of metal out here at the tracks. For years after the tracks had been shut down, the train cars had just sat here rusting away. I didn’t like that version of it though. I liked mine more and chose to believe it.
I liked to think that the trains had been on so many journeys and seen so many places that by the time they got to my small, boring town they were exhausted and needed to shed some weight so they could carry on seeing more places. The trains let go of little pieces of metal they didn’t need anymore and left them here for me to find. I liked to think that the tracks were covered in memories. Old memories that had been waiting so long for someone to come and look at them that they had rusted.
No one seemed to care about the tracks, or the trains or the memories. But I did. And while I wasn’t quite sure why I kept coming back, I did know that I couldn’t let those rusted memories sit there unseen.
The sun had come out again by the time I reached the tracks. I wandered around for a bit, until I found a good spot to start. I sat down in dirt and rocks and picked up a small piece of metal.
Great story. I voted “rust”, too.
Thank you! And thank you voting!