The trains I didn't take

There is a station somewhere where they wait, patient, all the trains I didn't take.

The one for that scholarship up north. The one that left at a quarter past six from the mouth of a man I didn't dare to kiss. The small, absurd train of a life in a town with a river.

I bear them no grudge. Sometimes I write to them: how's the platform, I ask, how's the dead track, and they answer with that long whistle heard only by those who stayed.

Because this platform is a train too, only slower: the house, the job, your hands, the daily bread in its usual carriage.

A train that announces no stops and yet is carrying me.