Trains

It's very likely that I am fully addicted to the internet. Then again, I am also addicted to self-expression, so the internet is a good outlet for such things.

I'm on a train.

Not a great start to a blog, to be certain, but there you have it.

I don't ride trains a lot. But as my family lives in one part of the province, and I now in another, train travel is going to be a necessary convenience if I want to reconcile one part of my life with another.

This particular train will not only carry me from Point A to B, but also through a very important town.

This is the town that housed my highschool, my first job, the river I spent many hours canoeing upon, and many many other elements that truly shaped me into the person I am today. As I pass through the town, I see these things pass in a flash by my window, but the residue of their appearance weighs on my mind.

A side note is needed here. My trip home to visit my parents was a brief affair, punctuated with necessary bureaucratic rites of passage, and the obligatory collection of mail from my university. But during this visit, my parents also forced me to sit down in the garage, in an effort to sort through one or two of the many many boxes that now resided within that enclosed space and take some items back with me to my new apartment in the Big City. As tedious a task as this was going to be, I decided to make the most of it.

As I sorted through the first box, I came across my grade 12 yearbook, the fondest momento I have from my entire highschool career. I remember making it my mission that year to get it signed from as many people as possible, likely with the assumption that since I wouldn't really see many of these people again in my life, it would be a decent idea to contain their memories in a small comment and signature somewhere inside the pages of that yearbook. It struck me, as I sat reading that great symbol of my teenage years, that this was one of my best laid plans.

I saw signatures of friends, distant acquaintances, castmates (as I was an active member of the drama club in my four years), teammates (the same comment goes for my participation on the rugby team), and various other classmates, and as I read through them, it hit me that each comment and mark carried with it a distinct and cherished memory of that person, no matter how well I knew them. Any negative memories of highschool (the awkwardness, the puberty, we have all been there) had been replaced in that second with fondness, and a realization of just how much I never realized I missed these people. How much I missed myself in that wonderfully memory-filled time.

When you leave highschool, everyone tends to make the same promises. To not lose touch, to hang out every summer/winter break/insert holiday here, to keep one another updated on life's small developments. Luckily, with the invention of Facebook, these elements have become easier, but regardless of that innovation, there are still those people who fall off the grid entirely, and your memories of those people are reduced to blips and quick faint images, much like how you see scenery passing along on a moving train.

Of course, this train is ultimately carrying me toward the here and now, the Big City, in which I will soon follow my new path toward higher learning. (Even higher still, I suppose, since I already hold an undergraduate and a graduate degree, but that's an item for reflection at a later date.) New memories will be created, but it feels significant that this train exists, and that every time I use it, I will be carried time and time again through this significant town. It seems to serve a constant reminder of those formative years, and that I should carry the memories of the people and places within those years in my heart as often as possible.