Some Trains Only Pass Us Once

There are certain moments in life when we are not left behind, we are simply not taken along.

This poem was born on a platform, but not just a physical one. It came from the feeling of standing still while everything else insists on moving. A train passing is an ordinary sight, yet it carries an unbearable metaphor: arrival without belonging.

When I wrote about sitting alone at the station, watching a train pass, I was not describing travel. I was describing time. How it moves forward without asking who is ready. How life continues, even when the heart refuses to follow.

The sound of the train matters in this poem. It is not background noise. It intrudes. It slices through inner silence the way certain memories do loud, unavoidable, and deeply personal. That ache does not fade when things become quiet; it becomes clearer.

There is a particular cruelty in closeness without permanence. Some people come near enough to awaken us, yet never near enough to remain. Like a train slowing down, allowing you to see faces, windows, lights then vanishing. The heart trembles, not because of distance, but because of almost.

Waiting beside the woods felt important to me. Trees remember. They whisper. They do not chase what leaves. In their stillness, memories grow louder. Promises once spoken return, not as words, but as movement leaves shaken by wind, fragile corners stirred again.

What hurts most is not that the train departs. It is that the platform does not. The world moves. Days are taken away, one carriage at a time. And yet, the one who loved remains motionless, watching life pass as if it belongs to someone else.

This poem is for anyone who has loved someone meant for another destination. For those who learned too late that not every arrival is meant to stay. Some trains, like some people, pass only once and leave us changed forever.

Thank you for standing here with me, even briefly.

Zeeshan Ameer Saleemi