You can’t hear the rain when you’re inside the Hypersonic Express. The train is racing at one thousand miles an hour through a fully enclosed, vacuum sealed, plex tunnel. It allows plenty of natural light inside and you can see the seasons pass and the precipitation fall in various sized drops all year long, but not a single sound of the outside passes through.

“It is an illusion,” mused an old man with a young heart. “Or perhaps an analogy. The world and the rain are so close, and yet they don’t matter. ” He put his face close to the window and watched the moisture collect on the world outside.

“It was last year only yesterday, and now it’s not, just like it’s raining now, but in an hour it won’t be.” He paused and looked to see if anyone was listening to his whispers of thought on this New Year’s morning. They weren’t.

He watched as the train circled through the city. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular. He wanted to watch the people, and the city, and the rain, and wonder how many of them thought about their lives and how fast this train was taking them through it. He recalled that he had once been a boy who thought he had an entire life ahead of him to change the world, and then he didn’t. It seemed like just a few hours ago; no, that wasn’t right; maybe more like last week or last year. Certainly it didn’t feel like 30 years. It really did seem like… like it was just a rain ago.

He wished he could warn the other passengers to be careful, to watch the droplets fall because that drop was far more important than what they were doing at that moment. After all, that single drop would never fall again. But no one stopped to look. No one noticed the lonely old man staring out the window. And no one stopped the train.

It just kept going and going and going.