The track is intact, but modernity hasn’t found a way to keep the railroad cars. All I want to do is board a train through the mountains. To stare out the window and see the earth’s The track is intact, but modernity hasn’t found a way to keep the railroad cars.
All I want to do is board a train through the mountains. To stare out the window and see the earth’s surface rising abruptly—no billboards, no noise, no messages begging for my eyes. For my body and mind to be idle.
The world, nude. Just enough innovation to witness it, and no more.

That’s what we wanted. A glimpse of awe. A vantage point we couldn’t see from home.

Instead, they built a gallery where you can buy souvenirs of something you never experienced. No ticket counters. No conductors. No steel and smoke and wind in your teeth. Just another screen. Another simulation.

Now you can drive an electric vehicle, scroll, and sit at stoplights in your very own car.

I imagine somebody else would rather go full steam ahead up to 6,000 feet and barrel back down to sea level. No service, no messages, just the rattling of motion, flung through wild terrain with no destination.*

I felt the track beneath me. Trees rushing past. Air beating against my ears. Now, we imagine what the mountain air might taste like, air that only an engine could reach.

The moon is perfectly in half. And it seems that we are, too. Split between the machine and the memory.

Before I return to my car, I remind myself: this is what I really want. Not nostalgia. Not retro fantasy. But velocity without distraction. Silence without sedation. Nature, unfiltered and too much for most to bear.

No matter how many people get with the times, I will find a way to appreciate the steel tracks laid by men who built something meant to last.* None of it expired.
It was replaced. Not by something better, just a more profitable way to keep you from yourself.

Idle time is what they took.
Now, we erase boredom with a blink. But that stillness? We called that living.

You can stream a thousand landscapes and never feel the wind. You can like a hundred sunsets and never see the sky. But one day, you’ll wonder why you feel nothing, and you won’t even remember what it was you lost.