All your closets of backlogged dreams, and how you left them all to me

Pause, and take a moment to appreciate our humble superpowers. Marvel, if you will, at our ability to bend so completely without breaking. Appendages wrenched in all directions, sinews of our musculature spiraling more and more tightly to accommodate limbs twisting at impossible angles, and maybe we suffer a tear or two, the pop of something dislodged from its joint, but these are just flesh wounds soon mended. Yes, we can go to improbable lengths to adapt, and so we do... despite how taxing these never-ending endeavors in contortion may be.

But death and taxes, those are the only two certainties. Anything else in life? Well, you just gotta take it on faith.

You know where you hope this train will take you. But you can't know for sure.

So many possibilities! What will pull up to the station? A midnight train going anywhere? Will there be strangers on it? Will I end up on the Polar Express... or the Orient Express? Perhaps fortune will smile upon me in the face of this looming nuclear winter, and I will find myself one of the lucky few passengers enjoying the luxury of the Snowpiercer as it chugs along on the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad. You would probably be spearheading revolution in the tail.

You know I welcome the fight, though. I would even welcome losing, if it meant you would be the victor. And before the spoils go to you, we should probably determine what they will be. What would you wager? What would I? Just how much of ourselves are we really willing to put on the line while it is still in commission?

The question itself threatens to derail us — the answer could dismantle every splinter of track ever laid.