This train is too slow. I got on it because I wanted to go far far away, because my thoughts were barreling forward like a train and my legs were itching and dancing in place. I was sick of this same old town. My frantic thoughts looped over and over, thinking the same thing about the same shops, so familiar I could think them faster than my neurons could fire. So I left. If the train is going one hundred miles an hour and I am running through it at seven miles an hour, then I am going one hundred and seven miles an hour, but I am still afraid of losing myself. My thoughts are going a million miles a minute and I’m afraid they won’t wait up for the rest of me.

My body might be slow, but I’m still faster than anyone else, and I won’t wait up for the conductor. I really tried to buy a ticket but the man at the ticket window didn’t understand. I told him I wanted a ticket for everywhere, for an infinite amount of new things to let my thoughts cover like clinging vines on amphetamines. I told him I had to get on the train to catch myself, to give my brain some momentum because it was tired of working so hard to chase my spirit. I let my thoughts spill out of my mouth as fast as my slow, numb tongue would let me, but my mind worked faster and faster and the new ideas piled up and burst through the dam of my vocal chords and little shards of new thoughts punctured through the old thoughts and I ran to get on the train because this slow little man wasn’t giving me my ticket. I didn’t have any money anyway.

The train is going west, and I run west down the aisle, ruffling newspapers and sending umbrellas tumbling to the ground in my wake. I laugh and laugh until I don’t want to laugh anymore, but I keep laughing and running. The conductor chases me indignantly, but he is only going one hundred and four miles an hour, and he is slipping on spilled coffee slicks and tripping on fallen umbrellas. A few confused curses fly out of his mouth between wheezing breaths, and I feel a moment of empathy for him. I know what it feels like to have so much to say and not enough oxygen or words to say it with, but nothing on earth could keep me from running or laughing.

I am good at running from cops and conductors and everything I have knocked over or destroyed. I don’t really run away, though. I run to. I run to the unknown, to the future, to myself. People tell me all I ever do is run away, but they’re wrong. I am drawn to people like a paper clip to a magnet, I am fascinated by them, I let my swarming thought work their way into every crevice of their personalities. I crave people, but what goes up must come down, and once I understand them, I’m gone. Another second there with milling, hysterical, recycled thoughts on the same obsessive fugue could kill me. So I leave.

My thoughts dash from love to school to cinderblocks to Audrey Hepburn to popsicle sticks. I may or may not be muttering fragmented thoughts aloud.

I burst through another compartment door, reveling in my freedom. I can run forever and ever, at one hundred and seven miles per hour. I pass a familiar face, an old magnet, but he is thoroughly understood and my hungry mind has no need for him. I crave somebody new. He calls my name, confusedly, as I hurtle by, but as the echoes reach me I am gone, gone, gone.

I am riding high upon my freedom and speed, I am caught up in the ecstasy of thought and motion. I am seconds from transcending this body that slows me down, of transforming into something other, something fast, from turning the linoleum floor into twisted plastic sludge with the energy of my feet.

I have reached the front of the train. The windshield spans in front of me, showing the great wide world tearing forward to meet me and disappearing in a blur to my sides. I run faster, one hundred ten miles per hour, and leap forward, expecting my soul to fly out of my mouth and to the horizon. Instead my body crashes into the plexiglass and I rebound. I fall to the linoleum floor like a graceless piece of meat. It is still linoleum and I am still human.

I think I am bleeding faster than other people do.

There is no hope, no escape, no running fast enough. I am trapped in this body. I will never find peace, I will keep laughing until I die. My energy terrifies me. I am a puppet, jerked this way and that by every whim of my thoughts.

It is a strange feeling. I am tired.

I gather myself up and run east. Running, running, definitely running from. I ram past the breathless conductor. I fly past the old magnet, who looks alarmed by my presence, my flight, the blood soaking my hair. Running this way is harder. I am still going ninety-three miles per hour in the wrong direction. I am running faster and faster in desperation. I feel like I am chasing the trees and buildings as they recede, begging them for another chance. There is so much to think about in each one of them, so many whirling patterns in their bark, but they are aloof because I scorned them while I was running west. I can barely keep my feet beneath me because the floor is wet with cold coffee I spilled, and I am more falling forward than running.

I retrace each step until I am in the last car, and fling the back door open. The wind plasters my bloody hair to my face.

All my thoughts are in unison for the first time I can remember. They are still the same hyperactive swarm, but they have bent all their intensity towards one thing. Their collective voice rips from my throat, hoarse and desperate.

“I want to die!” I scream to the receding trees.