Train, "Last Night"

In "Last Night," trains are used as a symbol of the narrator's time in a mental hospital when she was a teenager. On her last night in the hospital, the narrator and two friends left the grounds to walk along a set of nearby train tracks, and she often wonders in retrospect what any of them might have done if a train had actually come. Would one of them have considered jumping in front of it? The story begins with the statement, "I want to tell you about the night I got hit by a train and died" (3), which never happened literally, but symbolically it suggests that a version of the narrator's past self died on that last night in the hospital, as she emerged from her stay there a somewhat different person. She later claims that her time in the hospital "has ceased...