Know what the most peaceful sound in the world is?
Big old trains passing by slowly, humming, thrumming, plodding along, chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chug-on-repeat, fifty-maybe-sixty-thousand times, hulking mammoth machines drawing tirelessly across the landscape under an inky black sky, mythical in their size, ethereal in their passing, inescapably public yet supremely personal.
Barry walks alongside the train, hand on the side of a somnolent car, moving at a pace that would strip Olympians of their titles and leave bison steaming for breath, slowing the rest of the world down and making the mammoth stall. The metal car is smooth and cool to the touch, startlingly so, mimicking an ice-cold sea hours before the waves freeze over, a mixture of velvet and steel. The train lumbers agreeably at his side, like an old cattle dog, having put in centuries of work but still aching for the next thousand miles, the next ten thousand, even, should the rising and setting sun allow it.
Only the machine and its degradable parts can stop the steady procession, an eventuality confronted only when its wheels cease to pass over the ceaseless track, but neither Barry nor the train give way to the sobering thought, carrying on with their lives like they won't end. He doesn't know who guides the train, but seventy, eighty tracks from the lead he doesn't care; the beast is his only burden, the sole being in the night, almost divine in its solitude.
Everything at this speed acquires a certain magic. Blue blades of grass flow in slow, shimmering sheets under a waning moon; streams and lakes and shallow seas arch and flatten in the chaotic rhythms of a frozen, hydraulic dance; the dirt underfoot shifts with lunar permanence, retaining for an incalculable time the impression of his passing before the next footfall supersedes it, and the wind takes the rest away; even his breath acquires a deeper quality, slowing down, accommodating the reverential standstill.
It's when Barry runs that he finds this place of perfect stillness. A place where the entire world seems elevated to another realm, a place where he can think, and breathe, and simply be. Perhaps humans were always meant to see it this way; in the frenetic day-to-day, so much slips by unnoticed. In the finite spaces between each moment, existence is as narrow as the next breath, and as broad as the galaxies themselves. It is the place one commands in the universe.
Barry steps alongside the train, aware that his place is forever changing, but it is slowed down here, a here where he can catch his breath. He wishes that he could bring everyone here, to bring every human being who has ever lived to this place, to this crystal-clear night with a hundred billion stars overhead. Still, selfishly, he is grateful that the hundred billion are held at a distance, too far for him to see, and for once too far for him to save.
Here, it's just him and the passing train tracks. He walks alongside the beast itself, following its methodical movements. Both have a reasonable expectation of an end, but the uncertainty is freeing. He may watch the horizon with his shoulders down, for the finish line isn't in sight yet. The labor carries on. The Iditarod presses forward.
As a kid, running was a means to an end, a way to get from point A to point B. He ran to get away from bullies; he ran to get to his parents. Sometimes he was fast enough – but other times he was not. The running itself was somehow desperate and kind, proof that he was alive, and capable, and a powerful animal. He would cross the interluding distances until his body gave out.
After the lightning strike, fatigue stopped being an issue. In fact, the whole notion of tiring at Speed is somewhat oxymoronic. There is no sense of living or death in the Speed Force; just a profound sense of being, eclipsing both. He barely breathes, but he remains profoundly aware of the living motions of the Earth around him; the Earth itself barely twitches, yet the slow-moving snapshot captures a flowing moment in time, countless moments, rhythms etched in the air like stone, at once entrancing and deeply familiar.
The Earth is a living being, and at great speed those upon it become part of its stillness without ever possessing it, at once Earthen and outsiders, born of the soil but apart from it – for now, for now, for always now, until the internal clock ceases, and the stranger returns at last to the Earth. It occurs on a scale incalculable, but unrelenting, since the very dawn of humanity.
In nature, there are no clocks; time passes continuously, indifferent to placement in compartmentalized, bite-sized chunks. It simply is, as profound and forceful and harmless as the horizon, and at Speed it becomes clear that no measurement of it could properly suffice. There are no seconds, minutes, hours, days, or even years here; there are simply steps and breaths and blades of grass, passing trains and dancing rains. It is where humans were meant to live, and where Barry could spend the rest of his life, marathoning at the pace of the Earth, a day as a millennium, a year as five billion.
It's a gift granted to so few, and there hasn't been a day in the last twenty years when Barry has not been grateful for it. Like the subtle pulse of his heartbeat, or the simple act of a pause in his step, he is aware of the rarity, the enormity of his endowment. He kneels before the Earth and bears its weight upon his shoulders, because he is the bridge between the two forces, natural and unnatural, worldly and Other, Speed Force and multiverse.
It is unclear to him exactly where the titles belong. The world seems most natural in its fullness at Speed. In an infinite multiverse, the Otherworldly is far more prevalent than the worldly things it encompasses. And the Speed Force may be the sincerest form of existence there is, outstripping the supposed permanence of the multiverse. Yet neither claim – that the Earth is supreme in its flashy or stupendous pace – describes the whole picture. It must accommodate both views, or fail.
Slowly, reluctantly, Barry lets the train go. He does so gradually, first removing his hand but still walking alongside the train for a few moments longer. Then he stops at an arbitrary point, planting his feet and waiting for it to roll by. It does so with gathering speed, inheriting its song from before, a hum that carries for miles. He closes his eyes, feeling the passing breeze, more forceful with every second, forcing him back a few paces. As the train rallies and pushes onward, Barry sidles back and gives it space, unable to keep a smile from his face.
It's only a few hours on foot to Central City from here, and Barry turns towards the unseen but surely-there lights of the city beyond that depthless horizon, rallying his breath and listening to the train whistle blow, a long, lowing call. Speedsters, it hearkens, come with me.
He wants to, but he knows he can't follow the trains forever, can't lumber alongside the great movers of the Earth when he, too, must stay in motion. The train is needed elsewhere, and so is he.
With a powerful exhale, he sets his feet, sets his sights, and takes off, leaving a trail of blazing yellow light for hundreds of miles.