The Last Train Out

The last thing the nurse said before I signed myself out of treatment was,

“You won’t make it to morning.”

She was wrong.

It’s 2:17 AM, and I’m still breathing.

Union Station looks like it was built to outlive everyone who passes through it — all marble ribs and echoing bones. At this hour, it’s hollow, fluorescent, humming with that low electric anxiety only LA manages to hold after midnight. A single pigeon stutters overhead like it doesn’t belong here either.

The Metro B Line doors sigh open, and I step inside, hoodie up, head down, trying not to look like someone running.

Four of us in the car:

A woman in a red dress holding her heels like she just lost a bet.

A kid asleep on his backpack, headphones leaking static.

A man humming softly in Spanish, like a prayer only he understands.

Me, tucked into a corner, trying to keep my breathing even.

Outside the windows, the city slides past like it’s on an IV drip: neon laundromats, twenty-four-hour donut shops, a taco stand glowing faintly under a crooked “OPEN” sign. LA at night always alludes a sense of fragility. Almost like if you blink too long, it’ll fall apart and vanish.

Somewhere past Civic Center, the train jolts hard enough to rattle my teeth.

The lights flicker.

When they come back on, the skyline outside is wrong.

A billboard over 3rd Street advertises a nightclub that shut down when I was still in middle school. The cars on the road are chrome sharks from another century.

And over the intercom, the conductor calls the next stop in a language I’ve never heard before.

The next few stops come without announcements. Just flickers. A buzz in the overhead lights. The hum of the train changing pitch like it’s running through different kinds of air.

We pass Vermont/Sunset, but the ads on the walls are wrong — full of pagers, Blockbuster logos, LA Weekly concert posters for bands I thought were dead. One stop later, there’s a flyer taped to the window for a “rave in the ravine,” hand-lettered with glitter pen.

I remember those flyers. I went to that rave.

That night, I mixed Xanax with a warm 40 and passed out on someone’s jacket in a drainage tunnel. Woke up with gravel embedded in my cheek and someone else’s blood on my shirt.

The train shudders again.

It’s colder now. I pull my hoodie tighter and glance at the other passengers. Most are still, staring straight ahead like dolls in a museum display. But the man in the corner — the one who’d been humming — is looking right at me now. He smiles like he knows something I don’t.

“You missed your stop,” he says.

I try to swallow. “I didn’t hear it.”

“No,” he replies. “You missed it a long time ago.”

Another flicker. Another shift. Now the city outside looks like old footage… muted colors, washed out. Palm trees thinner. Billboards hand-painted instead of digital. A movie theater marquee flashes JURASSIC PARK – OPENS JUNE 11. I’m ten years old, eating stale popcorn, kicking the back of the seat in front of me. My mom’s asleep next to me in the dark.

I blink, and the train’s moving again.

The next station isn’t a station at all. It’s an open stretch of track next to what looks like the Los Angeles River, back before they covered it with murals and sorrow. There’s a tag on the wall outside — I recognize it. It’s mine. My old throwie from when I was seventeen, when we used to climb the fence and light up spots under the 7th Street bridge.

I never thought about who might see it after I was gone.

The train idles there for a second too long, like it’s giving me the option to step out. But I don’t move. I can’t tell if we’re underground or underwater or nowhere at all. I just know I’ve been here before. I feel it in my bones.

The humming man has closed his eyes. Everyone else looks like they’re asleep. Or at least pretending to be.

When the train moves again, it’s slower.

Every stop now brings something I almost forgot. A rehab intake folder with my name spelled wrong. A coffee shop I used to loiter outside of, pockets full of broken promises and barely enough change for a drip. A woman in a hoodie like mine stepping onto the platform and looking right through me. I don’t know her. But I think I used to be her.

At one point, I see the treatment center — not the one I just left, but the first one. I was twenty-two, detoxing so hard I hallucinated my dead dog barking in the hallway. That place burned down years ago.

So why is it outside the window now?

The lights buzz louder. The air grows heavy, thick with heat and something sour. I know where we’re going before the train slows.

Skid Row.

But this isn’t the Skid Row I left last week. This is Skid Row before the tents, before outreach vans and Narcan kits. Bare concrete and shadows. Yellowed light from broken streetlamps pooling like bruises on the asphalt.

The doors open.

And there I am.

Seventeen. Bones sharp beneath a hoodie two sizes too big, back pressed against a graffitied wall, holding a bent spoon over a barely breathing bic lighter. My old crew’s crouched around me, all ghosts now, long gone from this world.

I know this night.

I know what happens after this shot.

I wake up in an ER with charcoal on my lips and my mom crying over a bill she couldn’t pay.

I grip the seat so hard my nails bite skin.

“This is your stop…” the humming man says softly.

I step off anyway.

Heat slams me like a fist. The air tastes like pennies and rainwater and regret. I stagger forward; but when I turn back, the train doors are closed, glass black, and there’s no reflection of me inside.

Then it’s gone.

No rumble, no sound, no tracks. Just me standing under a streetlight that buzzes like a dying insect.

I blink.

And wake up in treatment.

Same nurse. Same hallway. Same clock on the wall. But something’s wrong.

The posters are different colors. The counselor running group isn’t the woman I know. My discharge paperwork spells the name of my street wrong, by a single letter.

I grab a passing patient by the sleeve and whisper, “What day is it?”

They tell me.

It’s my first day here. Again.

And somewhere deep beneath Union Station, I swear I can still hear the low hum of a train that isn’t finished with me yet.

I thought I’d changed the ending, but LA keeps rewriting me anyway.