Pretend you’re waiting for a train in a station full of people. You don’t know where your train is going, but you know when it is arriving and that it will inevitably take you somewhere. To pass time, you meet people in the station who are also waiting for a train. Some of their trains leave at the same time as yours, some before, and some after. No one takes the same train as you, nor anyone the train of someone else. Yet you all wait in the same place, waiting for trains to take you somewhere. It doesn’t matter whether your train will take you far or just across town, you wait in the same place with everyone else just…waiting.

Eventually everyone you have come to know start to board their trains and depart the station, leaving you behind. There’s always the same amount of people waiting in the station, because as some leave, more arrive to take their place and wait for the trains. This way, the station is never empty. It is a constantly fluid body of motion and energy. The simple act of waiting for a train demands attention, as the station’s ever-present stimuli keep the brain processing. It is forced to process and process and process the information thrown at it; the masses of people arriving and departing and waiting and sleeping and dreaming and talking and crying and wishing.

The stimulation is too much for anyone’s mind. You grow exhausted and fed up with the linoleum beneath your feet, the ceiling tiles above your head, and the people by your side. You get tired of staring at the same bricks in the wall and the imperfections within the intended orderly stacking.

And rather quietly, you begin to notice how routinely you sit and watch the trains arrive and depart, arrive and depart, arrive and depart, over and over again. As each train calls aboard another person, you can’t help but deign to be the one setting foot on the train. You stare intently at each train arriving at the station and, even though you know when your train is due to arrive, you still hope this train is yours. Each train that comes, you hope for the same thing to no avail. Insanity is the act of repeating something over and over again, but expecting different results. Isn’t that what you’re doing?

You start screaming. You scream and scream, but no one can hear you. But is it that no one can hear you, or that they are screaming as well and no one can hear anyone. Perhaps the people you scream to come to your rescue, but they have been around you so often that they are no different from the linoleum beneath your feet, the ceiling tiles above your head, and the people by your side. You don’t notice them anymore.

So you keep screaming.