Essay: Time Is A Train

Bradley Lau / The Underground Mirror

Author’s Note:
Like most of us, I’ve wondered about the lives I didn’t live and the selves I left behind. This essay isn’t an answer so much as a note to myself: we’re already on the train, and the view is still worth watching.

“Time is a train
Makes the future the past
Leaves you standing in the station
Your face pressed up against the glass.”
—Bono Vox

At a certain age, conversations with old friends feel less like reunions and more like therapy. A friend recalls you as sullen and combustible, while you remember yourself as perfectly reasonable. Another questions whether your group were indulged, unmoored, untouchable; you only remember a few mostly harmless hijinx. Even your mother asks why you seemed to despise her at sixteen, and you can’t recognize the child she’s describing. The past tilts, the mirrors warp. Memory is not a diary, it’s a forgery.

So we play the Sliding Doors game. Remember that Gwyneth Paltrow film from the ’90s? She misses a train, and her life splits in two: one where she boards and discovers betrayal, another where she doesn’t and stumbles into ignorance. Two parallel lives, both galloping forward, both haunted by what if. We’ve been playing that game for a long time now. What if I’d taken the job overseas? What if I’d married differently, moved differently, stayed differently? The tracks branch, the doors slam shut, and we’re left peering into compartments we’ll never enter.

The danger isn’t imagining too little. It’s imagining forever. We replay the arguments we should have won, the kisses we should have stolen, the jobs we should have refused. Then, tired of the past, we pivot to the future: grand plans, five-year schemes, reinventions that shimmer until they don’t. Sandcastles, all of them, waiting for the tide of time.

“We pace the aisles of memory and anticipation, ignoring the seat beneath us, the window at our side.”

Here’s the part no one likes to admit: neither nostalgia nor projection is real. The past bends to the teller. The future bends to the fantasy. In the end, ‘would have, should have, could have, doesn’t matter much. Meanwhile, the train we’re actually on rattles forward through this hour, this body. We call the past a labyrinth, the future a horizon. But the now? The now is just the car we’re riding in too ordinary to notice, but the only floor that holds.

The selves we mourn or project were never accurate anyway. You weren’t the rebel you thought.. you were a kid with a spotty forehead, bad posture and louder music. You weren’t the saint you imagine. In that other timeline you’re still restless, still scrolling, still human. What we ache for isn’t opportunity lost but certainty itself: the fantasy that there was one correct track, missed by half a step. As if chaos were an error, and not the code.

Which brings us back to the train carriage we keep avoiding: the present. Not the edited past. Not the cinematic future. This unstoried ‘now’. It doesn’t glitter. It doesn’t resolve. But it’s the only place anything actually happens. You can’t relive the party or preview the ending. You can only touch the hand that reaches back, breathe the air you didn’t plan to inhale. Nostalgia and fantasy aren’t enemies of the present, they’re just pointing clumsily toward it.

So here’s the only game left: stop. Let the ghost-selves drift through their alternate phantom cars. They’ll chatter without you. What they cannot do, what only you can do. Notice the light falling on this seat, this hour, this carriage.

The train is here. The doors are shut. Most days, I still crane my neck toward the ones that closed or squint at the timetable ahead. But every so often I remember: I am already on it. We all are. And maybe that’s enough to lean back, look out the window, and actually ride. Afterall, it’s all about the journey and not the final destination.