I got on the train, found a seat, and waited. Soon we were on our way, and I sat there, looking out the window. I'd been on trains before, I knew how they worked. Larger buildings gave way to smaller buildings, to clumps of houses, then houses that were not so clumped. I'd always wondered why people left their washing up on the lines to dry, when trains were going by all the time. Anyone who wanted to could just look out the window and see your underwear. As simple as that. We passed one house that seemed to have an incredible amount of laundry hung up. It was incredible.

And I thought, is this what it means to see the world? To come across things like this, yards and yards of laundry on miles and miles of wire? Would I end up in some foreign country, on some foreign train, looking through a foreign window and foreign underwear? I nibbled my sandwiches as we went. Would I nibble on foreign sandwiches? What was in a foreign sandwich.

When I had finished the sandwiches, I was full, so the thought of foreign food was like the thought of foreign land: would their dirt be different? After a while, I started to get hungry, and began to greatly anticipate foreign food. What do they eat? Bugs? People? Underwear? I was getting drowsy, and the day was wearing on. Did they sleep differently in foreign countries?

It's funny to me now, because I had so many questions, but there were so many things I didn't know I didn't know to ask about. Foreign languages, for example. I took speaking for granted. I didn't even think of speaking as a thing. Language was like my kidneys-- a part of me, but out of sight, out of mind. And skin. I knew that some people had different skin, but it never occurred to me that this was a function of different countries having different histories. I thought skin was like shoes-- they were chosen for you by your parents, and you put them on. Skin was just what you were handed when you were a baby.

I don't know if I was surprised, really, when I got off the train the next morning, looked around, and recognized nothing. There was no context of familiarity to see that things were different. I didn't recognize that the signs were in a different language-- I just thought they were weird art pieces. I saw that most of the people had the same color skin, which was not my color, and their clothes were not clothes at all, but costumes of some kind, like a perpetual game of dress up. I smelled smells, instinctively knew it was food, but I had no idea what kind. Breakfast food, lunch food, dinner food?

And then a... creature ran at me. Well, moved at high speed. And made sounds at me, and I realized it was a person, in some kind of uniform. He was waving a picture, and I saw that it was a picture of me, taken at school. The noises he was making sounded like music, in a way, but not really, and I tried to imitate it back at him, which made him go quiet. So we just stood there for a second. Then he made a gesture, a beckoning kind of gesture, I assumed, because he started to walk away, and I followed him, and whenever I stopped, he made the gesture again, and said things in the non-music music.

Went through some doorways and along some streets and more doorways and corridors and at one point he stopped me poked at an instrument of some kind, then handed part of it me. I could hear a voice coming out of it. My mother. I started to speak to the instrument, and the man creature gently placed it against my head, so that I found I could hear better.

"Mother."

"Where are you?"

"You don't know? They have a picture of me."

"But Frederick, you died last week!"