On the distance

I’m sitting in the restaurant car of a train. The window reflects a landscape I can’t name. It could be the mountains of the Sierra Madre, but the signs inside the carriage are written in Cyrillic, and the air is too cold for summer. I’m wearing a slim black suit, sipping a gin and tonic that tastes better than it should. My head feels ready to burst, my heart beating too fast, as if I’d just snorted two clean lines of Peruvian snow. The train is empty. Time isn’t moving; only the train is. I don’t know where it’s going, but it feels like I’ve been here before.

You’re sitting across from me in a blue dress, your hair falling over your shoulders. You stare without expression. I can almost see your sadness floating behind your eyes. I reach for your hand, but you slip away and laugh instead, lifting a glass of red wine that wasn’t there a moment ago. The train begins to move faster. The cold turns into heat, unbearable and slow, and yet you seem untouched. The world outside shifts into an endless desert, pale and trembling under the sun.

From somewhere, “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by Iggy Pop starts playing through the speakers. You laugh again and take my hand, this time with a grip that burns. I want to kiss you, but I can’t move. My body feels like glass. You’re still laughing when confetti begins to fall from nowhere, spinning in the air like dying snowflakes. The train races forward, and the desert outside catches fire.

“It’s the last time,” you say, almost whispering. “But not like the other last times. This is truly the last.”

“I don’t know if that’s how it’s supposed to happen,” I tell you. “Or if I can promise it ever was.” Tears gather in my eyes, but I can’t cry. I just smile, as if smiling could make it easier.

You tilt your head and sigh. “There isn’t much to say. Things become what they were always meant to be. You should go wherever this ride takes you…with or without me.”

You rise and come closer, kiss me like you did the first time: quick, sudden, full of light. Then the confetti burns into ash. The air smells like iron and smoke.

“There are no goodbyes,” you say as you walk toward the next car, already swallowed by fire. “Only jumps into different futures that sometimes meet again.”

You step into the flames. They don’t consume you. They just absorb your shape until you disappear completely.

Now I’m alone. The train rushes into a tunnel. Fire covers everything, but it’s cold, like snow that burns without smoke. My heart hurts, but I can’t move. Darkness fills the windows. I know I can’t follow you.

I start crying because I remember—I’ve been here before. I always reach the station alone. The train breaks through the tunnel and stops. The flames vanish. I find myself in an unnamed Eastern European city, the kind that doesn’t exist on any map. I wait for the next train to arrive, though I already know it never really does.

Then I wake up. The ceiling above me is white. The bed beside me is warm, but it isn’t you. I wonder if you wake beside someone else, and if, in the quiet moment before morning, you ever think of me…or if I’ve faded, like the confetti, into the air.

I make coffee and move through the day. The world feels distant, as if it’s still shaking from the rails. By evening, the memory begins to dissolve, until it returns again, uninvited, on another nameless night when I’ll find myself back on that same train.

Maybe you’ll be there.

Maybe not