Riding a train, facing the opposite direction of travel. I look west as the train speeds east.

Firing through time, watching the immediate past as I move beyond it, I’m unable to perceive what’s just ahead.

The present hardly exists, it’s over so fast.

It’s a little disorienting.

It’s a mirror of the strange riddle of living in time, only the hyperdrive is fully engaged.

What hits me most, though, is not how weird time is; but how much of this territory I’m personally connected to.

There goes Pilot Pete’s. I’ve eaten there.

There’s a little dive bar our band played at years ago.

I lived in that apartment complex. I got to know a lovely lady there. Every sensory memory washes over me, and I’m on that couch on that one night.

Passing right by where I work, I see my work truck, parked where it’s always parked.

The suburbs recede, one at a time: Schaumburg, Roselle, Itasca, Franklin Park.

I’ve biked in and through so many of these areas. Visited so many places. Made deliveries for the company, waited at traffic lights, eaten burritos, sworn at traffic jams and long freight trains. Bought gasoline and Cokes and bubble gum. Stopped for coffee or tea and read a magazine or book. Written my peculiar ramblings in a notebook. Worried. Imagined. Hoped.

This is the world I know.

It’s not a huge world, but it’s big enough. It feels like mine.

We belong to each other. We are merged, melded. My DNA is grafted into the trees and grass, it’s on doorknobs and handrails and park benches. The greenery, the pavement, the highways and cul-de-sacs, forests and drugstores, parking lots and cemeteries–all are familiar friends. Bathed in sunlight or covered with snow.

This world and I—we know each other.

I am, truly, home.