As I slowly opened my eyes it had felt like I had awoken from a dream, a pleasant dream where there were no wrongs, sins or problems. But something wasn’t right about this morning, something was different. When the fuzziness in my eyes gradually began to clear up I realized it wasn’t morning and I hadn’t woken up from a dream. Like in a silent movie there was utter chaos surrounding my heavy body lying on one of the sides of a tilted rail car. I couldn’t comprehend what was going on because the piercing sound of silence followed by a sharp ringing echo in my head. I tried to blink a small number of times to try to start my brain up again. “Where am I? What had just happened?” I checked my body for wounds or blood but thankfully all I found were a couple scrapes on my head. The railcar I was lying in had almost split in half. Within the wreckage there was blood and bodies intertwined between pieces of metal. It became almost too much to bear when I could finally comprehend the screams and moans of the badly injured As I analyzed my immediate surroundings I pieced together the smell of something burning, shredded metal, blood and body parts and crushed railway car in the conclusion that I had been in a train crash.
It was a cold February night and I was on a train headed to Bay Shore with my daughter Rita. The car rattled and squeaked under the heavy pressure of the full train. The car was surprisingly crowded for ten in the evening. I gripped the back of the seat in front of me with my weak hands as best I could as the car rocked back and forth, up and down. The massive cargo caused it to slow and drag more than it usually did. My deep thought about leaving home again was interrupted by another bit of turbulence on the track. My fingers had never ached like this before. It reminded me that much time had passed since my little girl was a little girl. She couldn’t have