KEEP PLANNING – Kyle E. Miller

I started hearing train whistles from my apartment more frequently than before. I thought it was unremarkable except that trains run on schedules and can almost be used to keep time. One morning I woke up to a train whistle though I can’t say for sure that it was the reason I woke up at that time and not a different one. We were having a warm spring and I installed my AC window unit earlier than usual but left it off overnight as the air cooled to save money, and the gaps between the AC and the windowpane allowed more noise from the street to come through. When I was at work I often imagined a scene where the windowpane slipped by some accident of its making and the unit dropped two stories to the ground. That morning I wished, as on most mornings, that I was living somewhere else. My landlord was trying to sell my house and I wasn't sure if that was legal but I supposed it must be because otherwise he wouldn't be able to get away with it. I didn't know exactly what was going to happen when they finally sold the property, but there were people in and out every Monday and Wednesday to look through the rooms, self-conscious and apologetic strangers who knew they were intruding on the intimacy of my rooms, spaces we don't normally show other people so readily that, by the nature of their business there, had to be examined. I tried to be polite but I snapped one day when the realtor told me there would be two more visits at an unspecified time later that afternoon. They always parked in the driveway and there was no other way to get out so once they arrived I was trapped and some of them didn't take off their shoes and left little stones on the carpet that I later had to pick up because the vacuum wasn’t strong enough to do so. Most of the prospective buyers were exceedingly polite and I tried to guess things about their personalities because any one of them might become my future landlord. I was told whoever bought the house would have to honor my lease but I didn't really have much faith in that for some reason. What if they decided to renovate the house? What if they wanted to split it into several apartments? What if they decided they simply wanted to get rid of me? Most of the buyers were middle-aged professional types that worked at universities or hospitals and decided they could make even more money by being a landlord on the side. A few of them were surprisingly young, probably half my age, which was somehow a little embarrassing for both of us. I got to talking with one of the younger couples. I assumed they were together. They asked how much the furnace bill was and whether the water ever froze in the winter and I told them that it usually froze once a year during the cold snap. They lived in town and I asked them if they had settled there for life and they said probably, yes, although you never knew what would happen. They thought the city was quaint and had everything they needed, culture and good food and cute shops, and they could tolerate someone getting shot at the gas station or hit by the Amtrak train every once in a while where the tracks ran through the main drag downtown. In fact someone had just been hit, they said, about a week before. I hadn't heard. I asked if they knew the person and they said they didn't but whoever it was had survived. For a while I had been feeling like I was behind in life lately, somehow never quite getting ahead to where everyone else seemed to be. Money was becoming a serious problem and I often woke up in the middle of the night. I wondered where people like me went when they got older and what they did to survive. If I had been born a thousand years ago I think I would have done better for myself, hunting, fishing, building fires and taking pride in erecting the walls of my own house. Maybe I was too smart to be really good at anything. My restlessness was probably just a symptom of that era of my life. I was between things and could no longer hide from the feeling that life had started to get a little out of my control but I wondered if it was just a product of the way I talked to myself about it and that if I could see it from another angle my life would look ordinary but perfectly, reasonably acceptable. Then again life had been subtly cruel lately, inflicting many small and indirect injuries that made me wish instead for a single direct attack. For example I had played a small gig at a local theater with a few other bands and a poet who read between acts. The audience was small but enthusiastic and after the show a couple of people shook my hand and told me they were moved by a certain lyric or the sound of my voice. I was feeling pretty good about it, confident that this was my best work so far, and it had been a long time coming because of my depressive cycles and having been born into a family with no cultural capital. A couple of days later I got a reply from someone I had sent my EP to and they said it sounded like a "timid imitation" of another singer I knew, one I thought everyone would agree was objectively worse than me. He was also much younger. There were other similar instances around that time of being subtly undermined in an almost anonymous and careless way which had the same effect as being given unasked for advice or criticism by people who have never cared to listen to what you had to say. A friend visited from out of town and first thing said, "I had a hard time finding your house. It didn't look like a place you would live," and he moved on to the next sentence without pause, making me doubt that I should be upset by his comment in the first place. I was seeing a new therapist and she was really into psychoanalysis, not strictly Freudian, a kind of synthesis, but I kept getting sicker and more depressed the longer I saw her and she kept telling me that I would feel worse before I felt better. I realized at some point that she could keep saying that and really believing it for an indefinite amount of time. My wellness could always be deferred into the future. So I lied and told her I was moving away and wouldn’t be able to see her anymore and I started feeling better after missing a couple of sessions. I made a concrete effort to stop analyzing myself and after a couple of months I realized I wasn't thinking about my problems as often or for as long. I was still depressed sometimes but I felt the release of a tiny clasp binding me to the control of a well-intentioned but domineering progress--I was less civilized now, which made me wonder if all the stories we tell ourselves about why we're depressed--about of our mothers and fathers and strangers who frightened us, about neglect and attachment and trauma--if all of those things are somehow fictions, a map laid over territory that bucks the map. And I wondered what that might mean about the way our minds work. Are our dreams and desires and fears simply unmappable and will always remain a mystery that no narrative can describe? Or is the mind more like a flat plane, certainly full of intricate impressions but at the same time sort of empty and to humanize and sentimentalize our problems is to put up a screen or multiple screens between us and the flat plane of a mind that might really be suffering from something called depression or anxiety but in fact those things are purely physiological and the explanations provided by psychoanalysis don't exist until we create them? But then once we do, it seems they have real power. I began to think of my analyst as a kind of vampire, one who really believed in what she did, as any vampire must. They believe in their need for blood but in truth the desire for it only exists because they've created it. After I stopped going to see my analyst I began practicing cognitive behavioral therapy on my own and it helped or seemed to help on most days. Resisting the urge to analyze myself was part of my CBT. At first it was frightening because I thought: what if I need to analyze myself, what if there's something down there buried deep and I'll only get better if I uncover it? And it was a very powerful thought, that I could learn something from my anxiety, but it eventually went away or I got used to it being there and I felt better. Sometimes I felt okay about everything and sometimes I didn't but neither state of mind was evidence of anything except the strange ease and difficulty of being alive. The day of the train whistle I went to vote in the city council election and stopped at the park on the way home. In the parking lot I passed two men with muscular dogs on very short leashes. They made a point to look at me which I thought was unusual. There were a couple of unreasonably harsh and crude people under the picnic shelter that hung over the river and a couple of people reading books down by the dock that was connected to it. The noise must not have bothered them. Maybe they were reading really good books. I kept my eyes mostly on the ground looking for the little treasures I sometimes found and collected and kept in a small, cheaply painted, pentagonal box that an ex-boyfriend had given me. To get away from the noise of the picnic shelter I walked as far as I could into the park along the river. Where submerged stones made the water curl, it turned the color of yellow mud, lined with gray. The edge of the water shifted in a pattern, a loose curve that narrowed and widened and then disappeared for a second before the cycle started again. It was difficult to keep the riverbed and the surface of the water in focus at the same time because the surface tended to move the eye away from the bed while the bed flawed the surface with white stones and the narrow crescents of brightness that were the backs of clamshells. Scrubby brown algae grew on lighter brown rocks and triangles of yellowish sand or soil sat between them, but the rest was green, light or dark, in the folds of the algae almost black. When the sun went behind a cloud all of the colors shifted. I turned away from the river to head back to my car and as my head tilted naturally toward the middle distance of the sky I saw four swords there. They were arranged one on top of the next but not touching and angled slightly so that if I had drawn an imaginary line around them it would have made a parallelogram. The swords were unsheathed and from where I stood they looked like longswords of no particular origin, vaguely medieval, but plain and undecorated. The hilts were a duller gray than the blades, which didn't appear to catch the sunlight even though they were polished, but I wasn't close enough to see if anything was reflected in them. They were stationary as far as I could tell; the clouds seemed to move behind them. They hung there. And then they were gone. The next day was going to be even warmer, so the heat didn't abate in the evening and the house was stuffy and still when I got back, the smell of toast in the air. I turned on the AC and left it on overnight which blocked some of the noise from the street and I slept as long and as well as I usually do.

*** Kyle can usually be found wandering Michigan's forests, turning over logs looking for life. He is the author of The Idiot's Garden, and his short fiction has appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, ergot, and Propagule. He won first place in poetry at Poetic Visions of Mackinac 2022 and again in 2014. He currently teaches college writing. Read more at www.kyle-e-miller.com. 28 November 2025