11 September - the train

It seems I take these trains by night. It is a strange journey, quietly humming through the darkness, through a darkness that could be plains or mountains. Sometimes another train passes us noisily, but mostly it is the contented throb of the wheels. We are our own reference frame, a corridor jolting through the heavens. I can walk from one end to the other, but it might well be an infinite train or a circular none. Gene Wolfe once rode this train, maybe even sat in this car. Unless it is an infinite train. Perhaps there is only one train, just as there is only one ship that plies the stars.

There are no postcards to write tonight. No existential cups of cranberry juice. I did sit next to someone pretty. But because I chose to. There may be one train, but we leave and enter it changed, sailors and conciliators alike. But what do I know of change? What I am now is a rebellion against what I was, or what I think I was. Only is what I think I was also a part of me? Do I create rebellion within myself to sustain me and move me, a dialectic that can leave me happier with what I am because that is not what I think I once was? A stasis, an antithesis, that appears as dialectic, synthesis, only through the illusion of time, which creates a past out of what I have chosen not to be.

Or is choice the illusion?

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