On a Night Train Through Cyberspace

I lean my head against the window and watch the landscape blur past. Outside, I don’t see cobalt rivers and wheat fields, but an endless silicon forest. Digital specters stalk the shadows and disembodied desires scraped from unwitting owners snag on the branches of the sycamores and sugar maples. Above us, the clouds take on a translucent, milky quality, their bodies sagging with the weight of society’s bloated memory.

First stop: Central Station. The digital town square permanently awake. We pull into the station and the whole world is waiting. At this junction of infinities, I brush shoulders with the president on the toilet and god listening to Discover Weekly, AirPods in her ears. I switch trains and head south towards the suburbs.

Outside, the ocean emerges under a lava-lamp sky. Tidepools froth with fleeting fame and obsolete emoticons sink to the ocean floor, where sediment layers of virtual life accumulate, digital eras compounding into iridescent stone.

Night falls, drowning the train car in the blue light of pixels and shooting stars. We pass town after town of glass homes, where inhabitants live forever jailed to a life of infinite performance. At one such town, you board and take a seat beside me. Your bloodshot eyes look up at me, and in them, I recognize my own starving desire to be known.

Countless nights we’ve sat beside each other on this train, discussing the quiet and forbidden edges of our lives. Tonight is no different. When a forgotten hurt flows out of me, thick and slow like honey, your gentle words are a salve. They remind me that here I am not invisible.

I wish to stay forever but cyberspace is not meant for sleeping. When I let my eyes grow heavy and rest my head on your shoulder, the train slows to a halt and your voice fades from gravel to dust. All that remains are the digital traces of a night stayed up too late chatting with a stranger in a shadowy back alley of the internet.

I shut my laptop and am once again alone in a rundown beach town motel off the 101 with teal walls and sea-damp hardwood floors. I fall asleep on the ground, mites in the floorboards and in my ears, wondering if I’ll ever know you in this world.

But I won’t. Because in this life we are forever strangers, our existences arbitrarily separated by the indifference of oceans and time. It is only in cyberspace, where the sky is made of synthetic sapphire and Gorilla Glass, that circumstances collapse and lives impossibly entwine.

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