At first, the train ride isn't too bad. It's not a train ride that you want to get - oh no, not at all - but it is a train ride which is somehow necessary. Think of it this way; you have lived in a certain place for a certain amount of time, long enough for it to be thought of as being 'home'. You have been there for a reason. The reason is not that important - a job, university, perhaps some other more obscure reason. The important thing is that that reason has now come to an end - the job has finished, a period of study is over. There is no reason to remain in that town any more. More importantly, there is no new reason to remain in that town. You must leave. It is necessary.
You make the most of it, and at first the train ride isn't too bad. You look at the oh-so-familiar streets (achingly familiar streets perhaps) from the comfort of the train seat. This is a novel view. You see the streets of home differently; the parks you walked through on the way to work or that university course, the shops yiou bought milk at every day. You notice, perhaps, the way that light falls on a certain street corner. You never noticed these things before.
The train stops at half familiar stations. You recognise their names. Recognise them as being part of your home town... but a part you never visited. You begin to feel uneasy. Home town? Is it a home town any more? You're leaving after all. The trains skirts through the edges of town. These are the regions that do not seem even vaguely familiar. The train speeds up and everything starts to blur.
The last station is passed and your home town is now a town, and all that is behind you.
The landscape outside the speeding train window is startling in its unfamiliarity. There is nothing of home you recognise there. The train speeds up and you regret leaving, even though staying would be worse (that rut that might drag on for years - until the end of your life - maybe) or would it? You reluctantly mounted the train with a wary optimism, but now all you feel is panic. The oddly emptied carriages are angled and jagged with strange dialects and references to places you have not known. You want to go back. No-one knows where the next station is, but they don't seem bothered. They've been here before. You find a train guard and he looks at you with an expression that is anything but comforting. How would he know the destination. He'll get off long, long before you do anyway.
With that sense of disquiet firmly nestled in your stomach, you buy another coffee that tastes like it was made in a country that is not your own - not the one you have known. You sit back down, sip the coffee that you know will do anything but calm your nerves, and watch the new and frightening landscape speed past you because there's nothing else you can do, and despite the terror its still somehow better than the alternative of staying behind.
Welcome to the future, you think, and with another mouthful of strange coffee, you sit back and wait for the first night in this new country to fall.
