Last summer, in the Xuzhou train station, I pushed through clamoring people and rushed down the escalator to the platform. The sun shone too bright in an overcast sky, and in the hot, humid station, a slight breeze, instead of relieving my skin from the sticky moisture, blew my hair into my face—like the dry grass swept with the wind in the Xuzhou countryside. I felt overwhelmed with sensations. I followed the group walking in front of me to step onto the train. The bright, harsh lights cast a sudden mark of the beginning of the end of my journey home. I moved down the aisle to get to my seat next to a wide window. The conductor announced the next stop, but I had many more places to pass until I reached Beijing. 
Then the city stretched out beneath the rain, the light turquoise ocean caught coalescing droplets, and as the bullet train sped up, I watched the station fall behind. I noticed white panels drawing a pattern of horses galloping to the east onto a tall, smooth bluff covered by yellow-green spruce trees close to the bottom and again on top, almost over the peak, after the space near the horses. Comprised of fixed running but stuck in place
Although each frame was short, the time spent in each city was long. There was so much we could not see and experience, and so much of one experience was contained within a last glimpse. Near the bluff, another train ran on intersecting tracks. The windows, wide and clear, created a blurring effect on the faces of the people next to them. The train ride captured individual picture frames of the fast-passing scenery.
 In the next hour, as I ate lunch and a waiter brought me sweet cupcakes, Xuzhou and the rest of Jiangsu province disappeared. The food tasted monotonous and brought back memories of eating sweeter cookies with light blue icing at a dinner table with friends in Jiangsu. When I reached Shandong, I watched dark pine trees close to me and deep winding paths through green hills, with scattering of trees throughout the landscape. A railway barrier obstructed the floor beneath the rolling hills, and the fog blanketing the mountains followed me. One path snaking through the panorama of green left a trace of curving, erratic line of beige that stops at an array of tiny houses, each one indiscernible from the next. I eventually fell asleep.
 When I finally decided to awaken, I found myself in a different city, Hebei. The sun created whiteness bordering the landscape under blue-grey clouds, as rustling oak trees near and far, dense and scattered, seemed to remain passing for miles, only occasionally disrupted by radio towers planted in the grass, whose lines blended into the sky, invisible. The wires reminded me of how all communication seamlessly interconnects between places. The grasslands, low and flat, extended across the dull, mesmerizing sky as shadowed trees obscured the blue mountains, now gone farther into the distance. 
Then I lingered on a bridge atop water connecting to tall buildings in the distance—the city of Tianjin.  Every scene looked different but each piece was part of a whole. Are the most beautiful and transient places all contained in slow, wistful returns? The sky turned a light sheet of sorrow, and the wide river seemed to reflect it. The darker, murky water appeared to be a surface so still that it could have been mistaken for solid. I noticed cars driving on the bridge, going into the city to work, to play, to return, to visit, and to do anything and everything a place could offer. In Tianjin, the achromatic buildings behind marshes emulated the blue mountains enveloped in fog that I saw earlier. When the train followed the bridge to a point and left, still outside the border of greenery, I rested my eyes again until I reached Beijing, home. 
The cities I passed on my journey back were not a part of the vast, varied experiences I had that I would bring home, but there was so much that was part of what I experienced, like the individual parts of each frame. Each moment on the train, each glimpse of the outside fading away, showed how much detail one place can hold and how there was no way to experience all the sensations in any city, no way to get off at each stop, and to slow down each moment.