I found this crumpled at the bottom of my purse today:

“My greatest fear is to inadvertently eat a package of nicotine gum and develop a sudden tobacco dependency”.

I’d better explain.

I was trying to leave Pisa, Italy. I had to leave Pisa because I had to get to Venice, in order to fly to Prague, and meet my dear friend Sarah. Sarah would be jet-lagged, having flown from San Francisco and taken a train from Berlin. It was pretty important that I be in Prague on time.

Pisa, however, has some kind of tractor beam.

Yeah, just like in Star Trek.

The first thing that happened is that my ride to the train station got me there late. This meant that instead of a six hour train to Venice, it would now take me eleven hours of intense transferring. After frantically berating the poor ticket agent (me in broken Spanish, while he used the international Purposefully Unhelpful Ticket Agent), I realized I’d have to wait two hours before the train left.

Once I got on that train, I was so tired I went to sleep.

I woke up in about an hour, just in time to pull back into Pisa. As I opened one crusty eye, four things happened.

1. I realized I was back in Pisa.

2. The engine turned entirely off.

3. The doors locked.

4. The lights went out.

There was a long, ominous pause, punctuated by the clicking of cooling metal.

There then arose a faint, but barely discernible keen, made by me:

“Let me off let me offletmeoffletmeoffletmeoff!”

As I began to realize that I was entirely alone and locked in a train, I felt the first faint stirrings of intense claustrophobia. Not generally a person worried about confined spaces, I noticed that all sorts of buried phobias arise when I’m in the dark trapped in a metal tube. As I rattled door handles and tried to exit via different cars, I began picking up speed. And volume.

“LET ME OFF LET ME OFF LETMEOFFLETMEOFF!”

My obnoxious jacket must’ve formed a kind of poisonous blur in the train windows to any passers-by. I started to seriously consider breaking a window.

Eventually, the last two passengers walked by on the platform. One of them used extremely delicate sign language to instruct me in the fine art of emergency exit levers, and I escaped.

I must have written that gum note sometime in the next thirty-six hours of sleep-deprived nausea. I have a vague memory of living off of candy machines, and trying to sleep sitting up.

I still don’t quite understand how I made it to Prague.