The train sounded distant at first, slowly getting closer. When Laura opened her eyes, she was inside the carriage. She didn't remember getting on this train, nor did she even know where it was headed. She only knew that she had to remain seated there—it seemed to her that this carriage knew her better than she knew herself.

"Next stop: Memory," announced a metallic voice over the speakers.

The word sent a shiver down her spine. For months, memory had been forbidden territory, cut off from her ever since her motorcycle accident on July 31, 2006, when she was barely seventeen.

She had been in a coma for almost a month, suspended between two worlds: reality and fiction. Her body fought to heal from a traumatic brain injury that wiped out much of her past. For Laura, there was something even more devastating about her injury: the disappearance of her reflection. She could not recognize herself in the mirror.

She had awakened from the coma in a white room, surrounded by faces that claimed to know her. Her mother, her sister, even her boyfriend whose name she would mention but would not connect to his face. Everyone expected her to remember. She only saw a wall.
"Your frontal lobe was damaged," they explained. "You may never fully remember who you were."

Who you were. Not who you are.

Her past was like a wound that wouldn't stop bleeding.

Since then, Laura had become a traveler through her own memories. Trains were her refuge: the only place where she could watch life pass without having to explain herself. She liked the movement, the rhythmic sound of wheels on the rails, as if with every kilometer something inside her was being pieced back together.

Sometimes, she would stop at unknown stations just to walk for a few minutes. Other times, she would close her eyes and let her mind invent memories: a childhood on the beach, an afternoon with a book, a friend laughing in the rain. She knew they were false memories, but for a few seconds they managed to fill the void.

Since the accident, the doctors had called it retrograde amnesia. She preferred to call it a dislocation in time. Often, what haunted her were not the gaps, but the flashes: fragments of something that might have been hers—or might not. Déjà vu would strike in the most trivial places—a café, a carriage, a voice saying her name—and in each, she felt she was about to find herself... but never did.

It was a soft, persistent curse: recognizing without remembering, feeling emotions without knowing why.

Perhaps that was why she traveled.

Because in constant movement, in the promise of a new landscape, she believed she could touch what she had lost:
Who she was. Not who she is.

One autumn afternoon, the train screeched to a halt. On the platform stood only one person: a man wearing a red cap. His presence felt so familiar that Laura's heart raced, though she didn't know why.

He boarded the carriage and sat across from her.
"We meet again," he said with a smile.

Laura looked at him, confused.
"Do we know each other?"
"That depends," he replied, without looking away. "Do you remember what you did?"

The question fell like a stone in water. Laura looked away.
"I don't know what you're talking about."

He sighed softly.
"Of course you don't," he murmured. "You lost so much when you chose to forget. But I know who you are, Laura. I know what you did... and why."

He seemed to know more about "her" than she believed she remembered.

He, wrapped in his own solitude and rage, felt a strange connection with Laura, as if they were two souls reflected in a mirror. The image of "her" began to gravitate around his own "madness," knowing that she is "her." Laura felt a chill run down her spine. There was something in his voice, something brushing the edges of a memory she didn't want to awaken.

"Of course not," the man murmured. "You've been running from this stop for years."

The train started moving. The lights in the carriage flickered, and for a second, Laura thought she saw her reflection multiplied in the windows: hundreds of versions of herself, each with a different expression. Some were smiling, others crying.
Who were they? Who was she? she wondered silently.

Then, a rush of images pierced her mind: a motorcycle, the sound of the wind, a laugh behind her. A brown-haired girl embracing her. Then, a sharp blow. Darkness.

The scene faded before she could make sense of it. Laura struggled to breathe.
"Ashley," the man whispered.

The name hit her like an electric shock. She had heard it before, in her mother's whispers, in medical reports, in dreams. Ashley, the friend who had disappeared.

"What do you know about her?" she asked, her voice trembling.

The man leaned forward.
"I know that you were driving. And that ever since, your mind decided to stop."

Laura shook her head.
"No... that can't be true."

"It is. And this train will not move forward until you remember everything."

She looked out the window. The darkness outside had thickened, horizonless. The train had stopped at a nameless station. On the sign, in red letters, it read: Guilt. But whose? Who was guilty, and for what?

The air grew heavy. Laura felt the weight of years in a single instant. The echo of the accident, the screams, the distant ambulance siren. Ashley lying on the ground. Laura's own body trembling, unable to move.

She cried. Not a brief cry, but one that seemed to come from every corner of her mind.

The man stood up. Laura stood up too. On his seat remained a red cap, and on it, a ticket with a handwritten phrase: "Seek the truth." Soon, he thought, she would know what he knows. The truth of who she is.

She woke up in her room, breathing heavily. Everything seemed real: the train, the man, the ticket.

A decade after the TBI that had changed her life, a new symptom quietly appeared: numbness in her right hand. Each day, her hand grew stiffer. It trembled when she tried to hold something. The doctors said it was stress. Others said it was "women's things."

No one saw the pain consuming her. They looked at her as if she were "crazy," as if she had invented her own suffering. There was no diagnosis, only silence and disbelief.

On the nightstand lay a piece of paper she didn't remember leaving there. She took it with trembling hands. In crooked letters, it read:
"Do not fear mental stops. They are like train stops: they are places where the brain rests, before the mind continues the journey."

She got out of bed. The hallway mirror waited silently. For the first time in months, she dared to look at herself. Her face was still marked by the scar, but it no longer felt foreign. Her image no longer felt empty.

She understood that she could not change the past, but she could learn to live with it. That memory is not made only of recollections, but also of choices. That morning, she took the six o'clock train. The same carriage, the same seat by the window. Outside, the world seemed different. Perhaps because she was, too. Would she see him again? Was he like those hundreds of reflections in the window—another version of her? Was she another version of him? Or maybe they were mirror neurons.