Rachel Toliver: ON WHAT USED TO BE THE R7 • Cleaver Magazine

Rachel Toliver
ON WHAT USED TO BE THE R7, ON WHAT USED TO BE THE R8, ON WHAT USED TO

In those days, what I call my girlhood, there was always a man and he was always at the end of the train. It mattered less who the man was. It was the train and the going that gave him a name, a measure, a distance between.

Here in Philly, in Germantown: the sunset on slate, the beech trees losing track of themselves. The streets that, when I was a girl, would make me a grownup. Then I grew up but I didn’t realize I was growing up because growing up took so long, all the years of boredom interspersed with years of hurt.

I lived for a while in Ohio. No trains there, where I was in Ohio, and this read in me like heartbreak. Like a hitch across the wrong track.

I used to think of being as I am, boots absolute and heel-heavy, black coat encapsulating my heart—tremendous, pulpy, stirring thing—this heart borne down Broad Street, right down Philly’s center, as I’d written, young—city salts surfacing—or some such way of fixing my grown-up face—in a thousand books, writing it again into this true dark January, into this skyline that diamonds and diamonds, all over, all over again.

From Germantown, you take the R8 but it’s not called the R8 anymore because of a confusion caused to tourists. Still when you take it what you’re taking is the R8 and its known way, its over the river way, as it makes beautiful sounds. The sounds it makes are all like ruin ruin ruin oh my heart ruin ruin.

There was always a man I wanted to see. And then I saw him. When I lived in Philly that man was in New York, when I lived in New York that man was in Philly. My longing went as train tracks did, R7 there, R7 back. Yes: my longing, the way it ran, an echoing repetition of itself.

Now in these years I’m back home, not in girlhood but something resembling girlhood, like the shadow weaving and ticking through gravel and ditches resembles the train.

Every landscape, here in Philly, is a landscape with interior. The El would come past. It gave me a breath and it came every ten minutes. The thought, I never wrote down. The El was like a thought and it passed ever unnoticed. Its doors closed, and I called it stupid anyway.

Standing outside Market East I think this is everything, the way kids said it, a sigh, the way everything is like water filling up a space. So I bum a cigarette from a lean young person with a bike. I bum that cigarette because I need to borrow the breath for being here, being beneath this moment. The skyline volts before me. In this world of bought things Market East is a bought thing, now Jefferson Station. I don’t do what I used to, which is go into a bar, sit there, get a beer alone because a beer alone could hold its upright soul and wait. It was waiting for nothing, it was just: myself, just there.

In Germantown, on this street, I could say I’m longing for myself, my younger, girl self. But, really, I’m following those streets, their tiers of lilies, not looking for myself, just looking, until there’s no self to be found, there’s only the looking.

I used to go to the place where the you that called was—on trains mostly, the best way to go before changing my mind. On a train, borne from dark unto dark, following the way of all those drinks, following the way of a river, the way of a highway—the way of something unrelenting, something unrelenting, and going, and inevitable.

I walk around Philly, thinking about sobbing. I’m not sobbing, just thinking about sobbing. The breath that comes between sobs. I’m a fan of breathing, my Ohio therapist said. I know I could just do yoga, instead of sobbing, instead of thinking always about sobbing. But my breathing only comes through the dream of sobbing. Close your eyes. In the visualization exercise I thought of the Jersey Shore, LBI. Then I started sobbing. What’s this, what’s this bringing up for you? No train goes there, to LBI, there’s only the train to AC, which I would’ve taken, sure, back then, in the no ocean no train-only therapy of Ohio. Any train to any ocean. Anyway everyone thinks of their stupid beach. Anyway, what I needed was the sobbing—sobbing, substituted for an impossible Atlantic. I’ll never, I stuttered, stuttered again, I’ll never get back there. Yet that’s what I have here, back here, the upwelling I find when I walk around Philly, the tide that rushes, the breath and then the other breath, the word enduring, the word endure.

And oh, when I lived in Ohio and came home that one time flying through Newark, the train from there. I used to take this train from New York too, the R7, as a girl, by which I mean my girlhood, not girlhood really but when I was in college and then just after, all my body’s momentum made for following a man to somewhere, from somewhere, either one. What’s in Croydon, I often wondered on that train line. What is Croydon, what’s Tacony. Now I say the words like certain prayers, like little low candles, lit. Croydon, I whisper. Tacony.

I wrote I used to a bunch, years ago, over and over, just little assertions, the feeling of perpetual that you get from looking out a train window. Ongoing action, in past tense. When I wrote down I used to everyone in my writer’s group said too much white space, said not enough plot, said yes but what next? That was the point: what next, always what next? I used to, action ongoing. But they wanted linear, as in train line, as in you and you, as in destination.

My last week of college I finished a paper, flung myself out of my dorm, to Penn Station, there and onto the train. Back home in Philly there was a band playing at some useless bar. A band playing at some useless bar: this means, a man I wanted to see. And I saw him. Later that summer in Jersey City he told me, come down onto the floor with me. And then nothing happened, the same nothing that was always happening, happened.

I reinvented myself once and then I proceeded, reinventing myself more, better and faster. I mean: I used to reinvent myself. I mean: I didn’t have a tattoo and then I continued not having a tattoo. I mean: I honed myself into a flame.

Happiness is the Trenton train station. Are words I never thought I’d utter. Trenton Makes, there and then flung past. When I landed in Newark after being too long in Ohio the East Coast was sere and cold and the opposite of spring. Oh you, heart, pending in New Jersey—oh you, along the tracks, oh you, oh you.

I used to have lived in this city, here in Philly, for my whole life. And then I lived here for some more, until I didn’t, and how grievous, how grieved, until I lived here once again.

When all along it was the sentence, its motion. I used to be out in a windy somewhere—crosswalk, awning, cigarette smoke—all awaiting—a waiting something, like getting laid, or finding a glove, or the phone ringing, or you. And the sentence, too, awaiting something, traveling, projecting forward, longing for and also stalling its arrival.

Really, Ohio was nice enough but the hedges meant nothing, the fountains meant nothing, the bridges meant nothing, the trees had nothing to say for themselves, everything draining then draining some more.

I didn’t come home then couldn’t come home then couldn’t come home even more, and when I could, finally, it wasn’t by train. It was by plane but moreso by way of longing, all the longing I used to do, as a girl, in girlhood, and that longing became a breathless moving, moved me into being a girl no longer, not anymore. But it had its own velocity, and somewhere it uncoupled, here and here and here, somewhere it made its metal sparking logic, its rust grammar, and I used to keep moving, until I moved back home.

Rachel Toliver’s work has appeared in Story Quarterly, Speculative Nonfiction, Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Creative Nonfiction, West Branch, Brevity, and other journals. Her essay “Catharsis, Diagnosis” won the Chattahoochee Review’s 2019 Lamar York Prize. Two of her essays have been named as notable in Best American Essays. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from Ohio State University and lives in Philadelphia. Read more work at www.racheltoliver.com.