Trained

by AJ O’Reilly

Look. All I know is that there is a train and it is a fast train and you have to be there on time and it’s very important to have the right fare and the fare is that certain kind of knowledge. In the first car of the train is my childhood dinner table and at the head of the table is my father, authoritatively making a point, and even in my daughter disguise my brain can make exact change and I’m the right kind of quick enough to argue in a way he will hear, so I have caught the train and can sit at the table, not yet worried about my mother and sister left hungry on the platform and as we whiz ahead past them I feel pride that I boarded on time. I pass between the clanking cars into classroom after classroom of loud boys less smart than me and girls I talked over, winning debates and accepting my As from proud and occasionally intimidated teachers. But then I’m in the long smoky bar car of graduate school, with its weed and its rape jokes and bored, boring sex, and through the intellectual haze I begin to see that despite me having a ticket and riding so long these men (these men, who know the conductor) all they want is the mirror I’ve made of myself and my thoughts, my real thoughts, have turned brittle and heavy as glass. So I cross to the back to the empty viewing car and I stare out the window at blurred face after face I’ve plowed past every day on the platform and I do not feel proud now, but listen, I have not been pretending, I love the knowledge and I love the speed and I love the clunk-clunk on the track of ideas and besides it’s been years and I’m all aboard now, it’s part of me now and how, how, how can I get off the train?

6S

AJ O’Reilly (they/them) is a nonbinary writer, performer, and walk-taker living in Portland, OR. So far their work appears or is forthcoming in HAD, Door Is A Jar, and Alocasia. Right now—like really right now, no matter what time it is where you are reading this—they are listening to The Mountain Goats. Find them on Instagram.