Trains

Even an hour distance can't seem to separate us from what happened a few months ago.  Every once in a while, a train whistles by campus.  We might be out in the grass enjoying the sunny breezes, or we might be cozy in a bed somewhere.  We might be happy, oblivious at least, but its horns rear us out of that reverie.  I see the train coming, with its lights, its horns, its majorly reduced speed.

Then in English.  I never noticed how many authors use death for some literary effect.  In every single large piece I've read this semester, someone has died, been killed, or killed themselves.  In the other pieces, maybe one in three stories featured death.  Death, death, sadness, death, and their significances.  It makes me angry, actually.  Are these authors really not talented enough that they find no stories about the human experience that don't include death?  Why the obsession with mortality?  No, that I get.  Why do we have to be so narrow-minded?  Why do we have to bring up those bad memories just to understand why somebody is sad and feeling lost?  Proof:  before now I didn't really weigh what untimely death meant to the people it touched.  That's proof because the author doesn't seem to be effective.  I have read a few that made me feel that feeling, but not most of them.

The train passes and I go back to my midnight homework, knowing I've lived to see the spring, the summer, children growing, young people experiencing.  I'm coming around to pity him, but it's hard.