An elderly woman boards a train and slowly realizes the passengers look strangely familiar.

She looked across the aisle at the man reading a newspaper. He was young, dressed in a sharp, tweed suit from the early 1950s, his hair slicked back. Something about the severe line of his jaw and the way he held his spine rigidly straight sent a cold shiver down her arm. She knew him. It was her Father, precisely as he looked when he was still an ambitious, uncompromising young executive before the weight of his expectations had settled into premature wrinkles. He looked up, his eyes passing right over her, seeing nothing.

A few seats down, two girls in knee socks and saddle shoes were giggling over a shared book. The one with the long, dark braid was immediately recognizable: Eleanor, her best friend from the fifth grade, whose family had moved away without a goodbye, leaving a void that had never quite closed. Eleanor was young, innocent, and completely untouched by the decades that had separated them.

A sudden, terrifying clarity began to dawn. This was not a physical journey across geography; it was a passage through time, an involuntary, immersive voyage through her own lived years. She wasn’t an elderly passenger; she was an unseen observer, a ghost navigating the landscapes of her memory. She rushed to the small mirror panel above the seat opposite, and in the reflection, she saw not her current self, but a woman in her late thirties—frazzled, balancing a briefcase and a bulky handbag, wearing the tired but determined expression of a young mother trying to have a career in the late 1970s. The scenes outside the window matched the reflection; they were hurtling through the decade of her greatest professional ambition, the time she had sacrificed so much.

Continue reading…