I am writing this on the train, which is the only honest place I have found to write. Something about motion makes honesty easier. The landscape moves and you are still, or you move and the landscape is still — it depends on how you look at it, and that dependence seems, just now, important.

I will not send this letter. That is established. I am writing it anyway because I have discovered, in recent months, that writing things to no one in particular is the only way I can say them at all.

You do not know me. This is the point.

Here is what I know about departure: it always feels like a decision you made, even when it wasn't. The train ticket, the packed bag, the careful goodbye — all of it assembled into an argument that says you chose this. Even when what you chose was only not to stay.

The woman across from me is reading something on her phone with the intensity of someone receiving news. She has not looked up once since we left the station. Whatever she is reading, she is completely inside it. I find this beautiful and frightening in equal measure.

I used to think that the opposite of loneliness was company. I am less certain now. I have been in rooms full of people and felt the particular silence of being unknown, which is a different thing from solitude — solitude has a quality of completion that the silence of crowds does not.

The train passes through a small town I have never heard of. There is a church with a tower, a petrol station, a row of houses with wet gardens. Someone's washing is on the line despite the weather. I see a child at a window and we look at each other for a moment and then we do not.

I am going somewhere I have been before. This is new for me. I am usually going somewhere I have never been, which is easier in certain ways and harder in others.

What I want to tell you — stranger, future reader, whoever you are — is that the going is not the hard part. The going is almost always simple once you have decided to go. The hard part is the interval between deciding and going, when you are still in the place you have decided to leave, arranging your face into something that looks like ordinariness.

The woman has put her phone away. She is looking out of the window now. Perhaps she finished the news she was receiving. Perhaps she decided she had received enough.

I want to write: things will be all right. I refrain, because I don't know if they will be, and because you didn't ask.

What I will say instead: the washing is still on the line, and somewhere a child is watching a train go past, and both of these things are true at the same time as whatever else is true, and that seems, to me, worth noting.