There was a man on the train, in the cold winter night… this is how this story starts, very appropriately. I met him on one of the rides I took often back then, going back home like every Friday evening, in the train corridor outside the compartments. Both of us did not have a place to sit in overcrowded train, so we were doomed to spend our journey standing by the window. You see, trains at that time were something a bit eventful and completely unreliable. They were always late,  always packed with people, you could easily smuggle inside and bribe the conductor for unofficial ticket for a half price to get a place, and you never knew with whom you’ll end up talking. So the two of us, without any commotion or stress, found our little place in the corridor, lit our cigarets by the window and started talking knowing we will probably never meet again. Train was going through the plains slowly and with much effort, squeaking, and shaking in a rhythm. It was an old machine, made too long ago, moving on old and bad tracks. As it laboured its way through the plains, like conquering some hostile terrain that gives so much resistance, making that huge noise and cradling its passengers in the motion, our conversation went on and on, following the randomness of the machines motion. Another thing about the trains at that time, they had a habit of just stoping. Somewhere, without a warning or any kind of explanation. Stopping in the middle of nowhere for unknown amount of time, with its passenger learned not to ask why. So did our train. It stopped. From that huge racket and shaking it somehow slowly came to a stop  without us noticing. We realized it after we found ourselves in the middle of the plain In the dark which is not moving anymore.. It is always strange to be in the carriage that doesn’t move. Your body, used to the constant vibration and rhythm, now feels almost violently made still. I never liked that feeling. It makes me nauseous and anxious.  But there is nothing you can do about it. As everything got still and quiet, so did our conversation. We were just standing there looking through the crack in the window to the dark. The landscape around us was flat and you couldn’t tell where did the earth end and the sky start. They were shaped together in one big darkness, completely black. Like our train was floating in some sort of void or deep space. We were just patiently looking at it. 

 And then he said to me:

I am standing alone in the plains, tall as a monument…

I looked at him, I still remember that moment, like something important was revealed. He just said that there is a poem that starts like that, don’t you know it_

I am standing alone in the plains, tall as a monument…

He felt that it’s very appropriate in this moment.

I looked through the cracked window, where I could see  clearly through the crisp cold air, this dark plain that surrounded us. And then I saw it, behind a figures shoulders, and back of a head,  so close to me in this huge space,  standing alone, straight and tall, gazing at the plain, knowing it very well and still lost in it.

There is something uncanny about the fields in the plains. I don’t know if you ever found yourself alone in one. The vastness of wheat or corn all around you. Standing there alone, in wheat to your knees, unable to see anything else. What is next to you is the same to what is the furthest from you. The lack of difference, the lack of variation. Desert made of abundance. The same, the same, the sameness of industrial landscape. The only variation is actually you. Standing tall, the highest point, you could be a mountain, a hill. You could maybe catch a glimpse of a combiner or a tractor in the distance, quietly moving on the horizon. But it is always too far away. Too far away to hear you or register you.  You are completely alone, standing tall as a monument, gazing around, not finding anything to catch your eye and give you relief, not even a single tree with a branch you could hang yourself from.