The Siberian Dream (from a Bench in Chicago)
By Lucelar
It was just past 5:00 in the evening, and I sat alone on a splintered wooden bench at a windswept station outside Chicago, waiting for the evening train. Snow fell in slow spirals, softening the edges of the world. I pulled my coat tighter, breath fogging in the cold, and let my thoughts drift. At 65, I’ve seen enough winters to know how easily memory slips into reverie. And before I even realized I had closed my eyes, I was no longer in Illinois.
The bench was the same, but everything else had changed.
The landscape stretched white and endless. The trees that framed the platform were tall, spectral things, wrapped in frost. A train hissed into the station, black and ancient, with a great headlamp glowing like a dying star. I boarded it without hesitation.
It carried me to Siberia.
When I stepped off, I was in a land so cold it seemed time had frozen with it. The wind howled low, like a warning. Snow creaked underfoot. I thought I was alone until I heard laughter echo through the trees.
That was Tanya.
She was bundled in furs, cheeks pink with cold, and eyes as sharp as the icicles hanging from the pines. “You look like a lost American,” she said in halting English, grinning. “Come. Before the wolves think you are lunch.”
She led me to a small village—a scattering of cabins half-swallowed by snow and smoke. That’s where I met Mikhail and Sergei.
Mikhail was built like an oak tree, his beard heavy with frost. He taught me to split wood properly—“Not with your arms. With your hips. Like dancing.” He had a surprising softness, especially when he spoke of the land. “You don’t fight Siberia,” he told me. “You listen to her. If she is quiet, you should be scared.”
Sergei, by contrast, rarely spoke. He’d lost a finger to frostbite years ago and seemed to carry silence like a companion. But it was Sergei who taught me the sacred art of stillness. I watched him crouch by a frozen river, lower a thin metal line into a black hole he’d chipped in the ice, and wait. After an hour, without moving, he pulled out a gleaming silver fish. He handed it to me without a word. Just a nod. In that moment, I felt accepted.
But it was Tanya who brought warmth into the cold. She showed me how to find mushrooms hidden beneath the snow—odd, wiry things that smelled like soil and smoke when roasted. One night, we sat by the fire outside her family’s cabin, eating a stew that steamed in the freezing air.
“Why are you here?” she asked me, stirring the pot slowly. “People don’t come to Siberia by accident.”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe I needed to remember how to feel cold. Real cold. Not just weather, but life. Stripped down.”
She studied me, then nodded. “Most people come here to run from something. But if you stay long enough… you start running toward something.”
Later that night, Sergei pulled out a battered old accordion. Mikhail sang. Tanya laughed at my attempts to keep rhythm on an old tambourine. It felt absurd and wonderful. In the harshest place I’d ever seen, I found the most human joy I could remember.
We shared stories by firelight. Not in full sentences, but in gestures, laughter, broken Russian and broken English. They didn’t care about my past, my regrets, or the long road that had brought me there. They just shared what they had—warmth, food, presence.
And then, as dreams do, it folded back in on itself.
I was back on the same bench, the one near Chicago. The snow still drifted lazily, the clock still ticked softly overhead. But something had changed. I looked down the track where the dream-train had emerged and felt a deep ache, the kind you feel when you leave a place that knew you better than the world you woke up in.
The train to Chicago arrived with a whistle. I stood, still feeling the fire on my face, still tasting the stew, still hearing Tanya’s voice in my ear:
“Sometimes, you don’t need to be young to begin again. Just brave enough to listen.”
And as I stepped onto the train, I carried their warmth with me into the waking world.
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