Mind the Gap

By Adam Murphy

I get the train into college every morning. It stops in Midleton at 7:38. Arrives in Kent at 8:08. That gives me thirty minutes. Half an hour to pass the time as the fields whiz by out the window. For the first few months this meant being on my phone, scrolling reels, or the NYT mini games. Then it was a book, or a look over my notes. After a while it gets stale, it all feels like a loop. The same fields, same games, same staring at your phone and waiting for the thirty minute intermission in your life to be over. It’s like a loading screen. Nothing happens here.

The rumble of the train on the tracks is the only evidence that time passes at all, all the fields look the same, sometimes I forget which stop we’re at and have to peer around someone to check. I go from my town, my home, places I know, streets I could walk with my eyes closed, to loud cars, pedestrian lights, people traffic, tall buildings and unfamiliar places. It’s as if I’m on a gradient between the two worlds. The old and new, two faces of the coin of my life. But what about the time in between? The side of the coin, the gap, the half an hour each way I spend suspended between the two? Am I in a third place here, or like Schrödinger's cat, somehow in both at once? If my life is split between two places, this is the intersection, either both or neither. But what to do with the time? Something new, something familiar, something half known, a skill learned and forgotten many times over. I sit writing this on the train, unsure if this is what counts. Is this the best use of the time I have here?

This writing is my only evidence of being here, this train bears no mark of my existence, yet it has captured my mind recently like a hopeless crush. I cannot avoid this time, it is a necessary part of my life, yet somehow feels completely pointless. An unavoidable tedium, to get through this same scene day in, day out. In twenty, thirty years time, will I remember this feeling? The hour I spend every day waiting, in limbo between my two places. What is there to remember, is the sheer uneventfulness of this time somehow noteworthy in itself? What will I have wished I did this time? Maybe nothing is the right answer, maybe looking out at the world through the window, not waiting for the time to pass but being present, maybe that is the best I can do. Do I need to try something new? Is the answer to my problem simply that the problem does not exist? Is the ad break of my life not just as important as the rest? I’m seeking a solution to boredom, something fresh, something to decide which side of the coin this journey falls on. I do this under the assumption that boredom requires fixing, that it has no benefit. I don’t appreciate the boredom, but is it not the thing that makes me crave novelties? 

If I delete this part of my life, upset the equilibrium, which way will the reaction go? Do I stand to lose something by sending biased parties into no man's land? Are my notes or my books battling for control over something neither should own? I’ve been unfair to this train, to what it represents–a neutral party, the one part of my life belonging only to me. I need to be grateful, for the break, the escape from my worlds that this train provides. For now I’ll keep my Switzerland, my depletion layer, my gap between old and new. I’ve found a new way to be bored. Novelty and boredom, love and hate, yin and yang. I need one to enjoy the other.