The Train That Taught Me How to Stop Measuring My Life in Arrival Times

The Train That Taught Me How to Stop Measuring My Life in Arrival Times

Khabarovsk let go of me the way dusk lets go of color—reluctantly, in thin gradients that feel like someone changing their mind in slow motion. I stood by the window of the carriage that would carry me inland, palms against glass gone cool with evening, watching the city slip into a braid of tracks and sheds, and I thought: this is it. This is where I learn to be patient. The platform thinned. The loudspeakers fell quiet. The wheels began their careful hymn, and I told myself that distance would be a lesson in attention, that the long reach toward Chita could be a kind of prayer I make with my body—forward, forward, forward.

I had packed like a believer in short stories: a plan measured in a couple of days, a sturdy hope, the promise of a hot meal once in a while. But it turns out some landscapes ask for a novel, not a sprint. As we left the station and then, inexplicably, stopped again—and again—I felt time stretch like taffy between Humaira's slender fingers. The Trans-Siberian opened its enormous palm, and I understood with the slow dread of someone who has just realized they've misread the entire situation: I would have to learn slowness at the speed of steel, whether I wanted to or not.

There are departures that feel like a leap and others that feel like a long inhalation you're not sure you'll survive; this was the second kind. The river city, wide-shouldered and work-bright, passed in frames—factory roofs, painted kiosks, a grandmother in a headscarf waving at no one in particular, and I waved back even though she couldn't see me because I needed to believe someone was witnessing this. The train gathered itself, then hesitated, the way a sentence hesitates before it decides its ending. We slipped past the edge of warehouses and then coasted back into a smaller station dressed in the same shade of practical gray. A whistle. A shrug of brakes. The doors sighed. It felt ceremonial without telling you what for.

Someone laughed in the next compartment, the kind of laugh that reaches for courage when courage is running low. I watched the reflection of my face float over the glass—Humaira's short wavy hair catching the last light, warm brown skin against cold glass—superimposed on piles of coal and the bright scarf of a woman walking the platform with quick, small steps. I thought: I am at the beginning of something that will not care for my expectations, and I don't know if that's freedom or punishment yet.

My compartment was the size of a secret, big enough to hold a person and her second thoughts but not much else. Two bunks, a little table, a window that could frame an entire afternoon if you let it—or an entire crisis if you looked at it wrong. I stowed my bag the way you tuck away doubt: firmly, as if firmness might make it smaller, might make it behave. The provodnitsa glanced at my ticket, stamped it with a tidy authority, and I felt held by an order older than my impatience, which was both comforting and infuriating.

There's a particular intimacy to a small room that moves. Every object matters, every gesture leaves a ripple. I lined up my notebook, my pen, a tin of tea bags, as if making a little altar to continuity, to the idea that I could still control something. When the wheels let their weight down and the carriage trembled into readiness, I had the brief, foolish confidence of a traveler who thinks she understands the arithmetic of distance.

Then came the second stop. Then the third. By the fifth, the arithmetic laughed and changed the subject. Time, it turns out, is elastic on these rails, and the day is a long animal that stretches farther than you imagined it could. I pressed Humaira's hand—slender fingers, the black bracelet on my wrist catching against the window frame—against the cold glass and tried to count how many ways a journey could betray your expectations.

We were on the kind of train that respects every small claim a town can make: a siding, a signal box, a platform the length of three tidy strides. The rhythm became its own weather—motion, pause, motion, pause—like breathing slowed for meditation or for grief, and I couldn't tell which I was doing anymore. Out the window, the city repeated itself in variations: one more kiosk, one more mural of a ship, one more worker folding his hands behind his back as he watched us not leave, and I wanted to scream just let us go already but my throat was too tired to produce anything louder than a sigh.

Frustration has a sound. It rattles softer than a spoon in a glass and then, without warning, grows teeth. I felt it circle my ribs and asked it to sit, to learn something, the way you ask a dog to calm down when really you're the one who needs calming. It listened just long enough to be polite, then tapped its foot against the floor of the carriage like it was keeping score of every minute we weren't moving.

At the corridor window, I met a man who wanted to practice the words he kept like coins in his pocket. His English was careful, his smile unresolved, and when I told him I was going to Chita, he nodded as if agreeing with a choice he respected but would not make himself. We spoke about long trips as if they were animals—how to feed them, how to keep them calm, how to survive them without losing your mind.

I remarked on the stops, how the city had not let us go without a fight. He grimaced with the eloquence of someone who owns the same feeling in a different key. "Three days. Maybe more," he said, and his hands added a little space in the air as if to make room for the reality between us. My optimism folded itself like a cheap map, useless and embarrassing. Still, there was something liberating in surrendering to a scale I could not control, could not fix, could not optimize.

News came through the thin grapevine of carriage talk: the dining car would not wake for us this time. The announcement dropped with the gravity of a small planet crashing into your afternoon plans. You could hear it tug at everyone's carefully rationed snacks and emergency chocolate. I thought about the sandwiches I'd eaten too early, the optimism I'd wasted, the way hunger in motion feels less like an ache and more like a slow fade into irrelevance.

I brewed tea at the samovar and let the steam bloom my face, grateful for heat you can hold when everything else feels cold and uncertain. A man two compartments down laughed and made a joke I didn't understand, but everyone leaned toward it like sunflowers, and I realized humor is a stove when the kitchen is missing. We improvised a kind of community. Sharing is easier on rails, maybe because everything else is shared already: the corridor, the moonlight passing through curtains, the little adventures of balance when the train decides to tilt and you grab the wall to keep from falling.

Siberia performed no drama for me; it did not need to. Birch stands thinned and thickened, thawed streams stitched silver across low meadows, and distant roofs wore smoke as a modest crown. Sometimes a small cluster of houses would appear like someone had shaken a handful of beads onto felt, then vanish before I could name a color or assign meaning. The horizon had a way of agreeing with itself that I found calming and also deeply unsettling, like watching someone be content when you're falling apart.

Night came bluntly. Windows turned into mirrors, and we traveled inside our own faces—Humaira's reflection staring back at me with tired eyes, short wavy hair messy from leaning against cold glass, the black bracelet on my wrist catching dim corridor light. I watched my reflection yawn and wrapped my scarf around my shoulders like a quiet decision to keep going even though I didn't know why anymore.

On the second night, sleep arrived like a friend who knows exactly how much to say—which is to say, not much. I woke at intervals to the soft negotiation of wheels and the subtle choreography of strangers moving carefully in the corridor, trying not to wake each other, trying to survive this together without making it harder than it already was.

I made rituals to anchor the hours: tea at the samovar, a page of notes, a slow walk to the end of the carriage to watch couplers shiver. I brushed my hair—Humaira's short wavy hair—so slowly it felt like reading, like I was trying to convince time I was still in control of something. After, I sat with my forehead against the cool window and counted the dim lights of stations that didn't bother to wake fully for us, and I thought: this is what it feels like to be forgotten by the world, and maybe that's not the worst thing.

The names of stations became a litany I murmured from the schedule, an incantation for arrival that did not come too soon. Each platform had its own gravity: a vendor with mittens the color of a childhood sweater, a policeman turning with the patience of a lighthouse, a boy hopping over a patch of ice as if the ground had challenged him to a game and he was determined to win.

By the time the third day admitted itself without apology, my impatience had grown bored and wandered off. I watched landscape the way you watch a friend explain something they love: quietly, with respect for what you do not yet understand, with the slow realization that maybe understanding isn't the point.

Chita arrived without fanfare, which is to say, correctly. Platforms don't need trumpets; they need feet, and ours—Humaira's feet in worn travel shoes—found them. The station's facade wore a look of practical welcome—no drama, the way a kitchen light comes on when you need it. I stepped down and felt the earth locate my weight again, and for the first time in three days I didn't feel like I was fighting gravity.

Every long trip ends twice: once when you arrive, and again when you understand what changed. I carried my bag through a crowd softened by wool and breath and thought about the small country we had been, carriage after carriage, with our tea and our jokes and our stubborn hopes. Outside, a taxi idled like a punctuation mark that could become anything.

When people ask how far it is, I will tell them that distance is measured in conversations and the number of times you forgive the clock. I will tell them about hunger as a teacher and humor as a stove. I came to Siberia to work at a university, to stand in a room and talk about verbs and velocity. But the rails taught me a different grammar: how to place a pause with care, how to let a sentence take the time it needs to become accurate, how to stop measuring your life in arrival times and start measuring it in the small moments you didn't plan for but survived anyway.