Stumbling toward the singularity, my feet crash against the sleepers and rubble but my momentum keeps me upright. Even after I have passed 17 sleepers the view stretched out before me is the same: the shape of the tracks, the number of discernible planks, the reflection of the early morning sun on the steel. Altering my point of reference changes nothing.
I wonder whether a train will come.
I try to remember whether I have ever seen a train along these tracks.
The tracks’ convergence would force the train to derail. I consider this and then try to stop. Gravity or some other kind of acceleration finally gets the better of me and buries my knees in the blue rubble. I rise quickly and dust myself off, glancing around, pre-emptively embarrassed, and ensuring that no-one has seen me pelt randomly down the train-tracks and dive just as suddenly into the space in-between.
I try to remember whether I have ever seen a train along these tracks.
The tracks’ convergence would force the train to derail. I consider this and then try to stop. Gravity or some other kind of acceleration finally gets the better of me and buries my knees in the blue rubble. I rise quickly and dust myself off, glancing around, pre-emptively embarrassed, and ensuring that no-one has seen me pelt randomly down the train-tracks and dive just as suddenly into the space in-between.
Only the cat.
Motionless, I cast my eyes toward the horizon and imagine the train. It does not derail. It gets smaller. At every point its wheels are as wide as the planks of wood that stitch these tracks together, and those stitches become infinitely smaller as they get closer to that point.
I am smaller.
Turning around, I realize that the cat too is has become less of a cat – more so because of the distance between us.
Carefully, (because I don’t want any part of my body to become smaller by itself) I bend down and grasp a handful of stones. Once again turning my back on the town I hurl them toward the end of the tracks. I watch closely as they rise, fall, and become tiny as they get further away.
If I continue to convince myself that the tracks meet, how much will change? The cat may have brought others, and I’m sure that it is at this point that they headed back, deciding, once and for all, that there was nothing so important she could show them that was worth jeopardizing a job, a lover or the start of a French play.
I press on, perhaps less enthusiastically than before, knowing that by the time I reach the point of infinity both the cat and I will have diminished to almost nothing.
