There is an Alpine lake that you see on the overnight train from Venice to Cortina.
I can't describe it since at this point Harry Potter movies have made this scene ordinary.
A train sliding around a mountain, cutting up the line where the trees are now Evergreens and the houses look like gingerbread. A long hill of avalanching dust. Yellow grass becomes a rocky.
My Great Aunt was a very rich lady from Florence with a powdered brow and long silver braids under a perfect wig. The overnight cabin was pressed and folded into chrome and wood, encapsulated by the metal car. I can't describe the elegance of her shoes or the tiny sink in the corner of the cabin or the engineer asking us if we wanted coffee at dawn.
By morning the top bed was folded up and I was sitting quietly in my little tights contemplating this trains contrast with the IRT. The #1 was thrilling, I stand all the way at the back window of the last car, looking down the dusty tunnel, my teeth vibrating inside my open mouth, my lips pressed into the plexi-glass. Unsupervised.
I am watching myself on this train to Cortina from a cross section of time and space, through my hysterical glasses. Looking diagonally at this chess board of temporal, empirical and status-quo. I wish I could zip up into a fantasy future, go dancing all night at a party in Mumbai. Then land back on 58th Street and Fifth Avenue. In front of that remarkable store window entitled "Day Tripper," where crystal Octopuses and sequence mannequins stare back at me.
Except there is a crack on my board, not to sound sentimental. A gape into darkness with no line to hold.
Describing pain is common, so here I go. A flash in one second that unthreads me, projects me into a rage and then I land at the edge of a lake called Shame.
You see how uninteresting a sentence that was?
All my projections run into this cold lake. A projection is this: with you all loneliness disappears. Trickle trickle go these droplets of expectation. There is no ending to this thought. I can't let it go. I stare into this lake, incompetent. Sometimes I take a boat and row on it. Afraid of catching a crab and falling in.
