It was the 19th of December

It was the 19th of December when I received the phone call telling me that my grandmother had passed away. Having no family living nearby, and little to no life outside of work, I decided to go to her house to tidy up and sort out her affairs so that my mother wouldn’t have to. For me, it was just three hours away on a train, whereas for the rest of my family it was a five-day journey by boat.

I took the number 41 bus to the train station that afternoon, in time to catch the last train of the day. I hadn’t taken this train since moving out to where I now lived, actually; my grandmother had loved any excuse to travel, even if just to see me, so when I had started to rent my apartment in the city I stopped visiting her, at her request, so that she could travel down to see me. The train was in a poor state of repair: wooden benches stained and splintered; windows almost opaque with dirt and smudges; an out-of-order toilet (a frequent enough problem that I had thankfully taken the necessary precautions); and only two shelves for luggage, though this fact didn’t overly affect me, travelling light as I was. As far as I can recall, oddly enough, I didn’t see a single other passenger on board, and this route had never been popular enough for the train company to wish to employ a conductor to check tickets (opting instead to rely on the honesty of the softened local people — the only ones to ever take this train), so I passed the entire journey entirely alone.