The Elsewhere Express

But decisions were time travelers, living in the past, present, and future all at once.

Nothing cut deeper than loss, but finding what you lost hurt too. You couldn’t hold it without grieving for all the years your arms were empty.

Ideas and dreams aren’t broken by hammers. They’re shattered by worries and doubts.

The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere is to be nowhere.

But purpose has little to do with 'what' and everything to do with 'why,' don't you think?

To be everywhere is to be nowhere

Smiles were the easiest of deceptions and the prettiest of open wounds.

Depending on where the shadows fell, the young man looked either beautiful or broken. In full light, Raya thought, he was both.

invisible loads were at least twice as heavy as any that you could see.

The hardest words to hear weren’t those uttered by other people. They were the words you refused to say out loud.

The world you left drapes people in gold to make you believe that they’re more valuable than a person wearing the skin they were born in. It builds houses with more rooms than people who live in them because you’re taught that an excess of emptiness makes a better home.

Does a journey require a destination to be worthwhile,

Every thought that passes through your mind is connected to something else. Memories. Lies. Truths. They’re all woven together. No idea or daydream stands alone.

Once created, thoughts don’t just vanish into thin air. They can’t. They need a place to go. And so, those thoughts come here.

You can’t miss what you don’t remember. Besides, if our old lives were worth missing, then we wouldn’t have drifted away from them, would we?

Forever was easy to drown in if you couldn't see the shore.

Every train, no matter how full is - empty

We can relive decades in the span of a train ride home and pluck a second from a day and freeze it, rewind it, speed it up, and turn it inside out. Time has no power over thoughts. When you have eternity as your railway, having a destination sounds rather trite, don’t you think?

Even before you got here, you’d drifted away from your own life. Everyone on this train had.” Lily flicked a piece of lint from her shoulder and watched it float away. “It might surprise you how little a person without purpose weighs.

You boarded it at the end of all your dreams at a quarter past your heaviest sigh. The train caught you when you floated away.

Tears choked you. Rage kept you breathing. Anger needed air to fan its flames.

You boarded [the train] at the end of all your dreams at a quarter past your heaviest sigh. The train caught you when you floated away.

On a spectrum of darkness, there was no bleaker shade than grief-tinted guilt.

The best parts of ourselves have known each other our whole lives.

I think sometimes, we hide things so deep that we forget they’re there.

She was used to living her life from a distance, watching herself from the back row as she mouthed someone else’s lines on a stage.

Maintenance could fix everything on the Elsewhere Express with one exception: Nothing could be done about Train Rot. This unstoppable black, putrid, creeping rot was not the common sort that soured milk or made garbage reek. Train Rot took root and spread, corrupting and consuming every thought the train was built from.