There is nothing darker than the world outside a train carriage, travelling at night.

In part, it is the contrast between the artificially-lit interior, reflected back from the windows on all sides, exaggerating the brilliance of this bright bubble of motion, in comparison to the vast opaque emptiness beyond.  The train carriage becomes your only sentient reality, surrounded by a world of dark matter and dark energy, which you might believe exists but, try as you might, you cannot perceive.

You press your nose to the cool glass of the window, hopeful of gaining some enlightenment on this impenetrable realm, but it remains at best a world of shadows.  Brief, fleeting impressions of light and shape and movement.  But, nothing concrete that you can cling to; build a theory around; identify as belonging to the world as you know it.

Outside, there are no lights brighter than your immediate surroundings; for long stretches of time, no lights at all.

Nameless stations flash past; a brief blur of illumination like a lightning strike in a thunder storm, but too fast for you to register.  How far to your stop?  You do not know.  Will you recognise it when you arrive?  You do not know.  This long journey into night appears interminable.

After a while, your senses now so confused, you find it impossible to tell whether you are travelling forwards or backwards.  Direction, in any way that you recognise it, becomes meaningless.  It is all just journeying.  All that you are left with is inevitability.  This journey will end; must end.  At some point, you will alight from this locomotive sanctuary; rejoin the external reality; take your own place in the darkness.

But whether you will find the elusive exterior any more or less real remains debatable.

© Simon Turner-Tree

Simon Turner-Tree has been sitting on the train for too long.