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The train tracks cut through the park, dividing playground from fields, parking lot from river. I've been going to this park with my family for years. Sometimes my older brother and I place pennies on the tracks when we hear the rumbling of the train in the distance, preparing for the line of thundering metal cars to flatten them paper-thin, the coins still hot to the touch when we scramble onto the tracks to press them into our palms.
We have picnics here to mark occasions - birthdays, Mother's and Father's Days, graduations. Then I graduate high school and leave the park behind. I don't think much about it, don't even imagine I'll be back in the city when I pack up my tiny grey car with all my possessions crammed into milk crates and garbage bags to move beyond my youth.
When I was younger, I imagined that moving across the country would transform me as a person. I thought that it would be like leaping onto that train, and somehow by the time those cars traveled across a few provinces and hit a few dozen cities, I'd disembark an entirely different person. All the anxiety and neuroses that blossomed during those years I was picnicking with my family in that park, I so badly wanted to leave behind. So when I leave the city and move, I think to myself that I will put those parts of myself I don't want to move with into storage, maybe not load them into my car. They can conveniently stay at home along with the rest of my childhood. Of course, that's not how this works.
When I do return to the city, I find myself drawn to this park. When I want to feel grounded, I sit on the stones by the river and watch the clouds move across the sky, the voices of families and lovers and friends floating faintly through the air to me. I run along the paths that wind through trees and over bridges. It feels like coming home.
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