Lightning in Afterlife

I take a nap on the afternoon of New Year's Eve while Marcio goes out running errands, and I have some strange violent dreams, culminating in a dream in which I had died. How I died didn't matter, even in the dream, at least not at first, but what I remember is that I was in this strange world, a purgatory city where I found myself waiting to go wherever it was that I was going next, and I was far from alone. I don't know if something catastrophic had happened, and the dream didn't answer that for me, but there were a lot of people there with me, some people I know, and the mood was unexpectedly light, as we joked and waited. We went down a stairs, exactly like a subway platform, and I was with my new friends, some of whom are people I'm acquainted with in real life. We were prepped as if an individual transport vehicle was coming for each of us, but then we were told that because of the volume of us, they were going to send a mass transit machine, and then an electric bus, like a San Francisco aboveground subway car, slid up. I got onto the train and it was dark and already crowded, mostly with younger people, many who seemed to know each other. I tripped over someone who had decided to sit right on the floor and I looked back at him, handsome, and smiled. I made it through a number of cars. all the way to the very back of the last car, where there were four seats, and I took one. Three of my friends were at the front of the car and I gestured for them to come back but they took seats closer to the front of the car. The girl in front of me was crying and holdng a map full of made up place names and it was raining as the train powered up and began sliding noiselessly through a made-up place, and I suddenly thought of my mother, on the other side, in the living world, and knew that I would have no contact with her, or any of my real friends, and I promised myself I would write them all letters that I could never send until maybe one day they could join me wherever it was I was going but I realized I didn't even know where that was, and my throat seized up, my stomch turning over, as I suddenly realized what I'd been trying to laugh my way around all along, that I was dead, that I had died, and I still couldn't remember how. I was alone.

I wake to a dark room. Alone. I don't know how long I've slept but I know it's longer than I wanted. I stumble into the living room and Marcio looks at me. "I'm going out again," he says, and leaves me.

I remember that strange electric city, the rain that never stopped but didn't get anyone wet, the lightning that preceded the train's arrival, how I was irrationally scared of it. I remember the train, the faces on the train, and the landscape, remembering that feeling of brutal epiphany: alone.