Their friendliness surprised me. Every passenger had an opinion, and they were more than happy to share it. I knew where this train was going, but I didn’t understand it. You could see it, etched in deep black onto every display. Europe. I started making my way from cabin to cabin, collecting verbal accounts from the passengers. I will do my best to summarize what these people thought when confronted with this train’s destination.
It’s a continent, a collection of territories that couldn’t be more different from one another in language and culture, and yet they all belong together. The only thing these places have in common, is a shared history of violence conducted over the very boundaries of each of these nations. How much of this space is mine, how much of it is yours? Let’s re-define that every odd number of years, not in a café over an afternoon Aperol Spritz, but on the battlefield. With swords, guns, and bombs. But now, or so I’ve been told, all that is done. Now they all belong together and bond over this shared history. Bound together by blood, one could say.
It’s because they all want the same things. Freedom, security and justice. We all want the same things, regardless of whether some choose to eat bread three times a day or indulge in a lavish dinner past 10 PM. The inhabitants of this continent love these subtle differences, it makes each and every group special, perhaps overly so. But what it means to go to Europe, was different for everyone. One man, not much older than myself, was traveling without a single piece of luggage to his name. He told me he was going to paradise. Another lady, who couldn’t stop complaining about the train’s apparent need to stop at random, told me she was going home. A stylish boy, who adorned himself with red tinted glasses and sparkly diamond earnings, told me he was going to hell.
Everyone here had a different story, a clear-cut idea of what this Europe was. And yet, in the midst of their differences, I found a deep sense of unity. What brought them together was what set them apart.
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You are currently traversing the limitless expanses of Visual Fiction. Each narrative fragment in this collection unravels a memory of a man drawn into an alternate reality. With every piece, he steps deeper into the unknown, attempting to describe the indescribable, to paint the unseen, and to make sense of the senseless. These tales offer glimpses into bizarre worlds that can at times feel both intimately familiar and strangely threatening.
