Downtown Greenway Extension, Minneapolis, Summer
The train runs by this bikepath.
I know a train is coming because I can hear the rails singing.
The train shifts, first blue, then red, and I'm thinking about how I know what redshift is and can picture it despite never having seen it.
Two Somali women are walking down the path.
They're here in Minnesota because someone in their country wants to kill people like them in their country.
The train blows back their hijabs like we actually are in a western, not a midwestern.
If we spend our entire lives believing in the impossible, or in the absence of that, the unseen, if we are only the sum of what we put into this world, then where do we go and where do we go when we die?
I was sure I'd be dead before turning twenty-one.
Sure I would never drink.
Sure my father would come back to me.
I'm twenty-four now, my father texted me once on my birthday, I drink more often than I don't, and where did all that belief go?
I spent so much time knowing what is now wrong.
Knowing like I know the scars on my face in redshift.
And I hear the train now.
I know it's coming because the rails are singing.
I can't see it yet, but it's there.