The train left Budapest at 23:47, seventeen minutes late. Maya found her compartment empty, the beds already made up by an attendant she never saw.
She had taken night trains before, but always with someone. A friend, a lover, once her mother. Traveling alone felt like rehearsing for something she wasn't ready to perform.
The conductor came through as they crossed into Slovakia. He punched her ticket without looking at her face. She wondered how many faces he saw each night, how they must blur into a single composite passenger—anxious, tired, going somewhere that mattered only to them.
Around 3 AM, she woke to the train stopped at a station she couldn't name. The platform was empty except for a man smoking under a yellow light. He looked up at her window, and for a moment, they were the only two people awake in the world.
The train started again. The man disappeared into the darkness behind them. Maya stayed at the window, watching the night slide past, feeling the particular freedom of being no one, going nowhere anyone knew.
By dawn, they were in the mountains. The light came slowly, first gray, then gold. She thought about all the night trains that had crossed these same tracks—carrying soldiers, refugees, lovers, strangers. All of them looking out windows just like this one, watching the same dawn break over the same mountains.
The story of a journey is never just one story. It is every story that has passed through the same space, all of them layered like sediment, compressed into something that feels, in the right light, almost like meaning.