Train heading to the past

Wait! How did I end up at the beginning of the 20th century in only one night? The last thing that I remember is that it was a day between June first and tenth of 2020 and that I was worried about my final exams and also the global pandemic that we are still leaving. I was tired, and I fell asleep at a very late hour. I was watching the repetition of a chapter of “Yo soy Betty, la fea” and I could only reach it in the first minutes because my level of weariness was huge. I only closed my eyes...

    I felt something heavy on my left hand, I looked at it, and it was a kind of bright brown briefcase, full of documents scratched by the conspicuous black ink of an old writing machine. My costume was like if it was taken from “Le Voyage Dans la Lune”, a gaudy long red wine dress, full of golden arabesques that could entangle between its branches anyone who stares at it. Accompanying my dress, I had a peculiar red hat, with a big flower on the top. I knew that that woman was not me, because of the color of her hair, the highness at her sight, and the accent of her voice. The echoing sound of the heals from all the women that were at the same place as me, resembled a victorian horse race. I say this because we walked with such a plight and hurry, that I felt the pain in my legs and the throbbing in my feet. It was more the sound of the heels than the number of females that we were since I can completely remember that from all the 30 people, only 4 were women.

    We were walking through a huge Marmol tunnel that farewelled all the visitors of a great building. Out of that great gate without doors was a clear panorama of an old city, full of tall buildings made up of brown and white bricks, with their oval-shaped windows and the typical railings that simulate a balcony. But there was a thing that I had never seen in my life and was a kind of elevated railroad that was half the height of the gate. This edification was duplicated; each one of the railroads was at the size of the highway for cars and carriages. It was supported by many columns that also were used to create a shadow where people could take refuge on sunny days and shelter on rainy ones. At that moment, I knew that my location was New York, and the time was approximately the 20th century. 

    The gate was becoming bigger as we were getting closer to the exit. More and more, my view of the city was improving, I could see better the things that were outside, and the tightness of the railroad was getting taller. I lifted my head and looked up at the upper part of that huge tunnel, while a loud sound of train claxon flooded the city. I could recognize some kind of wood squares that were symmetrically disposed at the roof, and that seemed to have a paradoxical contrast with the style and design of the Marmol that shrouded us.

    But immediately my eyes stopped at the train that was passing through the elevated railroad in front of the gate. The movement of this train was different. It seemed that it was wobbling and could not keep in a straight line. The booming noise was abnormal, and I could feel it since I (or the 20th-century woman that I was in) were 6 meters apart from the railroad. Suddenly the train broke into two parts. Time had stagnated, and I could see how the middle broken part of this big machine fell over me. This just happened in only one second, but for me and in my dream was like an eternity. After this, all turned black, and a huge impulse compelled me to wake up and come back to reality.  

    When I woke up, I did not know where I was since everything I had lived a few seconds ago seemed to be my own life. When I realized everything that had just happened, I searched on the internet for “old elevated trains”, because it seemed strange to me that in such an old-time there was this kind of transportation, or maybe I had concocted all that information that I just dreamed. But when I searched for images of these trains, the pictures that I found were shocking. Everything that I dreamed happened at the time and at the place I thought. It appeared to me that on November 27, 1901, there was a coalition of two railroad trains a mile east of Seneca, Michigan. The western limit train transported Italian immigrants to western New York. Estimates of casualties ranged from 50 to 100 dead with at least 50 to 125 injured. Also, the images were the same place as I walked through in my dreams. At that moment, my head was filled with questions, and my body was shivering. I supposed that I will never know why I was there and who I was in a possible past life.