I love the sound of trains. Hearing them helps me sleep at night, mainly because when I was growing up, I used to live right by train tracks. Being a fearful child, I would often wake up in the middle of the night and get scared by the darkness surrounding me. But off in the distance, I would hear the comforting sound of the train honks, and suddenly, I wouldn’t feel so alone.

During summer, my mom would take me and my brother to the apartment complex pool where we played with a bunch of other neighborhood kids while my mom would talk on the phone or gossip with other Mexican moms. This pool was special. The train was on the other side of it, the only thing separating it being a wimpy black metal fence. The train became part of the pool experience. The train became you. Whenever the train would pass by the pool, all the kids would go underwater and see if they could hold their breath longer than the train. It was kind of a weird tradition that all the kids somehow knew about and constantly attempted. Many failed, many succeeded, me being one of them. I haven’t gone back to that pool in years, but I remembered hearing about how a 12 year old pooped in there after we had moved.

There was this weird rumor that if you hop the fence, cross the train tracks, and hop the other wall on the other side of the tracks, you will get to a city 500 miles away. Obviously this is not possible because of physics and basic geography, but little gullible me believed it. I dreamed of jumping the fence, crossing the tracks, and getting to the other side. I was so desperate to see what was on the other side. To leave this place and go somewhere where I could be alone. No one ever crossed the tracks, and neither did I.

I don’t know where that train was headed, but I dreamed of hopping on there and seeing where it took me.

This became more deep than it should have. I just wanted to talk about how I like trains.