8. Overlooking Oviri Crater

Outside frosty glass, mountain landscapes hurtle past in silence, trees ablur in a calligrapher’s morse code.

Excited chatter fills the train cabin. Ever since the fellow wearing a paper hat came through. An announcement, about some kind of origami celebration on board, then suddenly — loose squares of color everywhere, children and adults scrambling for the rarest prints.

[ To hell with it, embrace the commotion: depress the play ⏯ button on an unattended Fisher-Price toy radio in the seat next to you ] —

---

One of the newly minted origami teams erupts in cheerful hollering. You spot their creation ambling down the center aisle: a Komodo dragon.

Folded airplanes fly amok, speeding towards the place of their birth.

Your window imprints a different memory, politely, in real-time.

---

// Side B //

Thank you for tuning in — that song was “evening train past valposhiavo”, a piano journal composition from last year. We’re now at 200 active subscribers and I’m incredibly grateful for your readership and support! 💌

I don’t know if anyone relates to this, but I’ve been living in confusion for a long time. On one hand, I’ve been wondering why no one knows the meaning behind the music and other stuff I make; on the other, I’ve never actually expressed those ideas in any spoken or written form. Their only claim to existence was as thoughts inside my head, rattling around daily, pistachio shells on the fritz.

Telling the stories is challenging. I’m loosening knots formed over years — years! — starting with my Travel Poems albums: because it was never done, and because this is a helluvan exercise for me. Each story takes me days of wandering mazes and solving puzzles connected to my past.

I’ll post the first story here. It welcomes a different train from Side A: leisurely, antique by comparison, more connected to its surroundings. It’s behind the scenes of chapter 1 track 1, “Gare du Nord”:

The station looked like this when I first considered telling this story

…do chime in if you’d like such stories (written on twitter/x) transcribed to substack format.

One last pit stop for you, if you get a moment for weekend standstill —

🌿