Time Trap

Every loss becomes a time trap.

This glass train was one Martha never asked to enter. She was placed on it against her permission when she was too young to be heard. She had ideas and glimpses of what existed on the outside of this train, but she had not experienced life in any other role other than that of a passenger.

Martha kept waiting for someone to stop the train. There were moments throughout her time as a passenger on this never-ending train ride she had slight flashes of hope. The blurry and unidentifiable scenery surrounding her on the outside seemed to slow as it was passing. The train never stopped or slowed. She would stare at the lines whirring by her so long, there was an illusion of them slowing and becoming more structured.

Martha often mistook the voices on the overhead as conductors announcing upcoming stops. These voices would instead tell her why she must remain on the train. They would tell her why she wasn’t ready to experience any of the stops she would see briefly flash on the digital boards overhead. Martha needed to stay right where she was, according to them.

Initially she resisted this notion and would frantically look for a way to stop the train or slow it enough to jump. Martha couldn’t believe there wasn’t a weak point somewhere in this glass structure, which could be broken with a proper strike. She had repeatedly been proven wrong, and eventually she relented to her fate as passenger.

Martha had dim memories of the voices on the overhead system trying to help her. This was far worse to her than the train she could neither stop nor exit. These voices seemed to know her. Almost with a mystical-sorcery. These voices were far more painful to Martha and the pain associated with hearing them was nearly unmanageable.

Hearing these voices on this speeding train, which became her time trap would alter her physical state. Her breathing would quicken and become more shallow. She would try hard to not move or make any noises to signal any additional details for which they could mine. She in those moments would feel like prey trapped in a glass cage, fully exposed and waiting to be destroyed.

Her safety bubble would float and suspend in time, these voices would move at normal speed. Interestingly enough someone suspended in despair witnessing normal speed from others feels like others are moving as quickly as a spacecraft reaching warp speed. Everything was mismatched and disconnected. It was an added terror to her extended experience on this glass train.

She knew this feeling too well. She remembered it. It felt like being inside the eye of the storm. Quiet and stillness surrounded her, yet everything outside that space was moving chaotically fast. She had been siloed from everyone in her life. She could see nothing but her own body, the space it occupied, and the whirring, blurred lines racing past her outside the solid glass train. Martha was paralyzed.

In the end her only hope was to destroy this encasement. As Martha considered throwing herself into what appeared to be a weaker point in the thick, seemingly indestructible glass structure, she closed her eyes and smiled for the first time in years. Perhaps the voices who had tried to help her were right. She opened her mouth to finally use her voice, despite all the times it had been lost in the void. She took in a deep breath and yelled, “I choose freedom!”

Martha’s eyes remained closed as she began to hear the noises of cracks running along the glass. Everything around her was shattering and her body somehow remained unharmed. It was overwhelmingly loud. Somehow Martha was overcome by a trancelike peace, until everything around her went quiet. Her time trap was destroyed. When she opened her eyes, Martha was awake for the first time in four decades.