Train-riding at night. Maybe it should bother me that I’m provincial enough to be awed by something so mundane. Naive enough to find something poetic in catching the midnight train to Vermont Street. But it doesn’t bother me, not tonight.
                There has been a slight streaky rain and as we roll over the wet tracks the yellow light turns the drops on the windows to gold.
                The green tint of the train windows makes everything look vaguely ill, and I can’t decide if I like that or not.
                Train riding at night is like two worlds. When there are lights outside the train, you can see your larger surroundings, the worlds you’re travelling through; but when the lights disappear the windows yield only the reflections of your fellow passengers, a tiny microcosm in a metal box. It’s like the real and the beyond the real—one can see thru the reflections to the world outside. The light on the inside is causing the blinding reflection, its the lights on the outside that enable you to see.
                There’s a touch of the mystical in it, the divine, life-or-death questions-and-answers. I imagine I might die on a train someday.
                I imagine plummeting to my death in a flaming el-train, they’re so vulnerable. Perched up there on the tracks, nothing really holding them on. Whenever the train picks up speed, I just know it’s too fast, that the train shouldn’t be shaking like this, that the wheels are wobbling and the track isn’t smooth. That instead of making a seamless curving transfer from one track to another, the wheels will suddenly skip, train derailed, and all the cars full of passengers will suddenly crash! down onto the street below, crushing innocent pedestrians as well.
                I imagine being twisted and crushed in a horrific subway accident. There’s something infinitely terrifying about a subway. I think it’s the fact that there’s no way out. It’s a tube, a little earthworm tunnel with no escape hatch. If another train is speeding towards you, there’s nowhere to. Boom. Head-on collision.
                I imagine myself being murdered in an empty passenger car. That’s how I’ll go. Like something out of Sherlock Holmes. Terror At Midnight. A slight man in a grey 3-piece suit will neatly dispatch me with a few well-placed blows from his brass-tipped cane. Except there will be no Basil Rathbone to step in and save me at the last moment.
                Of course, here on earthbound, commuter-only Metra, there’s nothing to fear. The outside chance, maybe, that while I gaze out the rain-wet green window philosophizing, a car will stray across the railroad tracks. My last moments, here, now, on a fluorescent-lit train from Chicago to Joliet, with this smattering of tired people who I’ve never seen or spoken to before. We could all be taken hostage suddenly, and this group of strangers could become my surrogate family. There’s a weird kind of kinship, somehow, between us. The midnight train-riders.
                They say it’s a Ship of Fools, but I see it more as a train. A Train of Fools, hurtling towards oblivion. A little self-contained vortex. You’ll never get out.
                If you consider it in this context, it can be utterly chilling to hear those mechanical chimes and a tinny voice warning, “Caution: The doors are about to close.” As if they’ll never open again.

-Violet Nova, Remorsecodeblues #17