"Training" the mind on the intricacies of circular reasoning meh

 

The day we returned from the Great War, we climbed aboard a crowded ship bound for home. I'll never forget the sheer agony of that day. We'd run out of ammunition and food by the time we got to the shore. Our weapons felt light and our legs heavy. Exhaustion ate its way through our entrails, leaving us with nothing but what felt like long lugs of wood for limbs.

It was only an hour's ride back home yet it felt like ages. It's surprising how time can do that.

Despite the sleepless nights spent in the trenches, under the cover of make-shift bunkers where we tried to duck and hide, the terror of fire raining from the sky extinguishing all our notions of what a normal life was like -

it is strange how a lonesome hour of waiting in anticipation to get home, aboard a boat where our safety was assured, still seemed tougher to endure than the nightmare we'd been through.  

At this point, I had expected relief to wash over me. It didn't.

Instead, the newfound annoyance of waiting with no end in sight, as time torturously inched forward, forced me to think of ways to occupy the minutes that, like guests who overstay they welcome, didn't seem to know when to quit.

So I dreamed up a story,  in the hope that the words would fill the void that time's complete lack of haste left behind.

In the story I told myself, I see a passenger on a train that's in no hurry to get to its destination. And in his sheer frustration, after being fed-up counting seconds that wouldn't budge, after minutes of staring out the window and ceasing to be distracted, he, like me, decides to tell himself a story. And this is how it begins-

The day we returned from the Great War, we climbed aboard a crowded ship bound for home. I'll never forget the sheer agony of that day..

-conceived and composed on a train ride that, at the time of writing this, continues to go on.