Parallel Tracks

And then it went dark.

And then I woke…

I’m on a train.

The year is 2022. Stella is a 23 year old young woman.

An aspiring fashion designer living in the heart of New York city.

She had everything.

I’m not (yet) wealthy, but I have everything.

I have a close knit circle of the most precious friends, each of them a gem.

I have an energy within me. A gold, healed energy that other people strive to have, be around. I have a presence. I’m the girl that captivates your attention in the room.

I have everything.

I graduated high school from an all girls private school. I work a restaurant job where I have found an entire work family rooting for me. I spend my spare time sketching clothing designs and sewing what I sketch, creating them to life….

Another train?

I don’t remember switching trains…

I suppose I don’t remember much before falling asleep, I suppose I had been too tired…

Nothing inside of this train car looked like the world I had just seen in my dream…

How long was I asleep?

It felt like a lifetime….

The year was….

What was the year?

Did anyone know?

It certainly wasn’t as progressed as the dream I just woke from.

That dream was eerily familiar, as if I had just come from it before dreaming it…

It seemed as if a whole society went on within this train car. The passengers on this train were so glamorously dressed, and so was she. She looked down and saw herself dressed in a long gown of purple fabric, and the most lovely jewelry to match. Stella guessed that it wasn’t too far from the early 1940s, observing each passenger’s appearance and mannerisms.

She had woken to a party.

“I think I boarded the wrong train” Stella thought to herself.

Stella admired the passengers enjoying their soiree. Some dancing, some drinking, hardly any of them sitting down. She watched them all. She was intrigued by them. She studied each as they moved past her. Some of them she thought she recognized, but she couldn’t remember from where. She picked out a person or two who looked familiar to her, but she couldn’t place them.

The world that existed outside the train car windows could only be seen in a blur due to the train’s all too quick speed.

Inside, it felt as if we were not moving at all.

Could anyone from the outside see us?

Could anyone see the train?

Where are the train tracks?

Things on the train started to get weird…..

She felt a reoccurring uneasiness…

As if she simultaneously existed elsewhere…..

The blur of what might have been a whole other world outside the train window seemed to be what was moving at an uncontrollable speed. The outside was the thing that showed no signs of slowing down.

Was the train moving at all?

The time inside the train never seemed to pass.

No, no…

There had to be a way off this train…..

She stared out of the train window, at nothing in particular, in horror. In desperation.

She was stuck on this train.

As soon as she thought this, the train sped up. faster. Faster.

Hasn’t this happened to her before?

“WAIT!” She tried to yell, at no one or nothing in particular.

The train didn’t stop. Something hit it bc it was speeding far too fast.

Everything went dark.

...

What a terrible dream…

She said to herself, shaking still, as she realized what she thought was happening was only a dream. She called her mom to make sure her mom was ok, even though she knew the terrible dream she woke from of her mother killed in a train crash was only a dream. Her mother didn’t answer. No one in her family answered when she called. Where are they? Aren't they worried about me?

She would call them again when she was off the train.

Wasn’t she dreaming about attending a glamorous party on a train car, during the 1940s?

She looked forward while waiting for her train to leave the station, but she was alarmed to find that everything was dark. There was no lighting inside her train car, and she couldn’t see past the black outside the train’s window. She couldn’t see through the dark that there were other passengers in the train car.

She was scared.

“Oh how terribly we miss her” she heard a voice say from somewhere in the dark.

What? Who said that? Who did they miss?

She caught the smallest glimpse of light ahead of her in the train car, and suddenly saw a mother and her small daughter sitting in a seat a few rows ahead. She thought she recognized them. They looked familiar to her, but she couldn’t place them…

She was suddenly reminded of one of her favorite memories with her mother when she was a little girl. Her eyes started to water.

Another flash of light came from behind her this time, almost as if she was inside a lighthouse being circled by its light beam.

There was another little girl sitting with her two grandparents. Another favorite memory of being a little girl with her own grandparents played in Stella’s mind.

Her eyes filed with tears, but she was unsure why.

The train car seemed to be speeding up. She couldn’t see, but she could feel motion increasing around her.

Faster.

Faster.

The train crashed one last time.

The pitch black remained.

The train Stella boarded in New York. It had crashed. It had killed passengers. It had killed Stella.

The dream. The 1940s train car. The life happening inside that train car. Stella had envisioned it all as her life was beginning to end. It was a time period she dreamt of existing in. It was where she was brought in those moments between life and death. A glimpse of another life.

The second dream. Her loved ones involved in a train crash. It wasn’t her loved ones involved in the train crash. It was her. Nobody was answering their phones when she called because she wasn’t calling.

The voice in the dark about missing someone. Someone was talking about her.

The flashes of light. The little girl with her mother. The flashback. The little girl with her grandparents. Both of those little girls were her. Moments of her life were being shown to her.

The final train crash. The dark.

It was her life. It was the end.