It is generally thought wise to begin a tale with some notion as to its outcome and perhaps even its significance in mind. It was then with great trepidation that Theodore undertook his whimsical attempt at fiction. He had woken early with a general unease having roused him from slumber. A proclivity towards the unreal or perhaps the partially real had characterized his dealings with those upon whom he chanced on any given day. That and a sense of unbridled melancholy – an insatiable nostalgia for a past which by all reckoning he had never known. This day was to prove no exception – save for his nearly inexplicable thirst for the penning of a tale which seemed at once to root him to the firmament of his all too undulating existence and to render him transcendent all the while of the same. There had been a train in his dreams – and a woman. What the two had to do with one another he was as yet unsure. He was determined nonetheless to forge a link however tenous, however apocryphal between them. The train had led somewhere to be sure – but that meant little – or at least it seemed inconsequential. A mere detail – trains must lead somewhere after all. And the woman. She had a visage of sorts, angelic yet muted – which was about as monumentous a triviality as the bearing of the train. There was something else, however. A detail, a moment, a figment of fitful sleep perhaps, a demon of the most uncommon banality.

"However unforseen the excruciating presence of the contiguous haunted me with a ferocity of boundless proportions. The contiguous – the once was, and the now, and the ever present – a consciousness of the inevitability of the inseperable elements of yesterday and tommorow. I shall be you tommorow. Time frozen, time unfurled into the ribbons of its essence – at once, all at once. Dreams are wholly undiscriminating – the blurred countenaces of so many a love lost, of so many, of so many who had known so little – redeemed ever in death. And in sleep they knew their lot, though in death they wished for nothing."

The train bore Theodore in no discernable direction. He was understandably perplexed as to where he now found himself if such an idiom is worthy of even itself. What was clear, however, was that he was facing backwards. That is to say that the world flooded him with a serious of amorphous hues wholly indescribable in terms of natural contiguity. What he had seen was before him, what he had yet to discern lay somewhere in the reaches of the after before. Mobility stagnated, progression turned on itself – and such was his lot – or at least such was the lot dealt him by Hypnos. And as he gazed into yesterday, as he made out the corporeal evanescence of the bygone now, of the ever turned on itself, he reflected on the unadulterated purity of metamorphosis. Alone, and ever alone he was girt by the whims of Fate. And so into whose reality did he falling wake? Into whose here and-now did he intrude?

There was certainly nothing overtly remarkable about his disembarkation. He arrived at his destination and simply got off the train. His arrival was not so much ignored as it was wholly unappreciated. It was Theodore's impending encounter with Death which would render him forever of tomorrow. His story then can not be recounted in any particular tense – being of the never now and the nevermore. For you see death knows no contiguity and certainly has no appreciation for the delineation of the contiguous which we have come to so unquestioningly embrace.