WE NEED INERTIA
—An excerpt from my forthcoming memoir, Where Furnaces Burn.
She wrote down notes on my knee as I explained to her the pronunciation and then away she went back to her bed to study. Out on the road traveling I was anonymous—no one knew who I was or what I had done and it didn’t matter—all that mattered was right now—how I acted in that moment, in each situation. How I smiled, the feeling I got from people, and the feeling I gave them. My name meant nothing. My past meant nothing. My accomplishments meant nothing. Only my energy, my confidence, and how I made people feel. There I sat in that quiet train car—two Italians to my left, one in the upper bunk reading a book about China, one at the table reading about Russia. Across from me a babushka all in blue with her arms folded, asleep upright on the bench. On the same bench as me, to my right, a middle-aged man sat staring out the window as he had since getting on the train at Krasnoyarsk that morning. Dim Russian folk music played on the speakers above. Occasionally the same four young men, perhaps soldiers, passed by going to the space between the cars to smoke. As I waited for the girl to return I was overcome with a feeling of uncertainty. It’s what days, weeks, months of not working does to you. Even though I was traveling I felt restless, in need of accomplishment. We need inertia. To feel as though we are working toward something, not simply moving through space, but for a reason. I’ll stay here for a while with the hope she comes back so I can at least ask her name.
