The Time I Threw Myself From a Train and Why I Always Arrive Ahead of Time

My father never had a driver’s license. I’ve thought about this many times over the years — what it means that a man who needed to control everything, who weaponized time and movement and the simple fact of his presence or absence, never had the one instrument that would have given him total control over where he went and when. Instead he walked. Miles, constantly, and made us walk with him — and whenever we asked if we were almost there, he’d say yes, and another hour would pass, and the answer was always yes, right up until we arrived, because “almost there” was never a measurement of distance. It was just the thing he said to keep us moving without complaining.

But that’s a different story. This one is about a train.

We were going to my grandmother’s farm — my father, my mother, my brother, my sister, and me. I was around seven. The train stopped at a station, a twenty-minute pause to change drivers, the kind of routine halt that means nothing to anyone on the train except someone who cannot be still.

My father had to get off. He was like a storm that way — always building, always looking for somewhere to discharge. Sitting in a train car for twenty minutes while nothing happened was not something his system could absorb. So he got off and walked. Because that’s what he did. He walked.

Twenty minutes passed. The train began to move.

I was near the entrance of the carriage. My mother was inside with my brother and sister. And through the window, or maybe already from the door — I don’t remember the exact sequence, only the image that followed — I saw him on the platform. Standing still, which was unusual. Not running. Not signaling. Just standing there, watching the train pull away from him.

And he was laughing. I don’t know what he found funny. I was seven, and I didn’t stop to work it out.

What I did was open the door — an old train, forty years ago in Portugal, the kind of door that opened — and throw myself off it.

The train stopped. Everyone screamed. My mother was in shock. My father walked over, still calm, laughing now at me specifically — the ridiculous child who’d jumped off a moving train, apparently — and got back on. We continued the journey. He was perfectly composed for the rest of it, the way he always was after something happened that shouldn’t have, as if the event had already been filed under a category he didn’t find interesting enough to keep open.

I’ve carried that image for almost forty years. Him on the platform, laughing, the train moving. Not panicking. Not running. Laughing.

I don’t know what it means that he was laughing. I’ve considered the possibilities — that he genuinely thought it was funny, that he was performing calm he didn’t feel, that some part of him was testing something, that he simply processed things in a way that produced laughter where other people produce fear. I don’t know. I’ll never know. The man was impossible to understand, and I stopped trying a long time ago, and some things about him I’ve accepted I’m just going to carry without resolution.

What I know is what I did. I was seven years old and I saw my father being left behind by a train he’d stepped off, standing still and laughing on a platform, and I jumped off a moving train to reach him.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because I think it says more than I know how to fully say: whatever he was, and whatever he did, and whatever our life with him actually cost — at seven years old, I could not let the train take me away from him. Not even for a station. Not even when he was standing there, calm, apparently untroubled, laughing. I jumped anyway.

I have never, in my adult life, been late for anything.

Not occasionally punctual — compulsively, obsessively, ahead of time, every time, to a degree that people who know me have noticed and remarked on. I arrive early. I account for every possible delay. I would rather wait for thirty minutes in a place I’ve already reached than risk making someone else wait for thirty seconds. The anxiety that arrives if I’m running even slightly behind is disproportionate to any reasonable reading of the situation.

I know where this comes from. It took me longer to name it than it probably should have, but I know.

He kept us waiting. Always. For everything. Whether he’d make it or not, whether he’d deliver or not, whether tonight would be safe or not — always on the edge, always uncertain, always one more minute that stretched into ten, into thirty, into an hour of “almost there” that meant nothing except that he wasn’t there yet and we had no choice but to keep waiting to find out.

I became the opposite. Not through a decision — through something that calcified, gradually, without me choosing it. The version of me that would make someone else feel what I felt on those platforms, in those corridors, in those stretches of not-yet and maybe-not — that version never developed, because whatever was forming in me was forming in direct opposition to the thing I’d been given to form against.

The train stopped. He got on. We continued.

He was calm. He was always calm after something like that.

And I have never made anyone wait for me.

Not once. Not if I can help it.

That’s the whole inheritance, right there — the one I chose, out of everything available.