Finally, the time on my watch and on my iPhone’s intermittent reception correspond with the train schedule that was posted on the corridor’s wall–the one that had been mocking me since I left Beijing six days before: Moscow Time.

It’s funny how inconsequential time becomes when you’re on a train for so long.

The whole concept of “are we there yet?” does not apply, because you know damn well you are not. The vast plains that stretch before you, the forests’ stark shadows that play tricks with your mind, the tundra that haunts and chills you even as you sit safely in your train berth, and the myriad train depots acknowledged but for a minute, all indicate the thousands of miles left.

So you do not wait. All you do is exist, attempting to find meaning in the shifting environments and the stories of travelers encountered on the same journey. You bide time, finding that the only constant and only source of strength in the frozen tundra of uncertainty comes from within.  The time then passes so quickly once you’re at peace with this permanent state of journey.

That is, until the last hour of the trip. Any notion of reason, patience, and preoccupation is thrown to the wayside, another piece of trash on the train tracks, yet another bit of flushed excrement from the train toilet disappearing as the wheels race by.

Suddenly, time is torture.

The train crawls. The seconds stagger, a drawn-out dance around the outskirts of Moscow. The welcoming committee includes the graffiti murals and beige smoke stacks, and the crumbling brick warehouses with their barbed wire, nodding as you pass. Citizens–bare-chested paunchy men grilling for the bleach-blonde women by their side, outfitted in leather pants and five-inch stilettos–lounge at picnic sites near sparse grass embankments, a life-saving green compared to the thick dust and gray of lands and time zones past–perhaps only three days before yet a lifetime away now that you’ve come so far.

Twenty minutes left before the train pulls into the station. The past six days are a flash of memory, and now those last moments of the journey are the burdens too difficult to bear.

I am antsy. My stomach is a roller coaster on these otherwise smooth tracks, gently swaying past more and more concrete buildings and churches and crowds. The frigid frontier nights the past week across China, Mongolia, and Siberia, with the stern border guards and drug-sniffing cocker spaniels and glare of florescent lights, the possibility of urban legend of nocturnal bandits made reality, were never dangers.

But now, the grandmotherly comfort of my train berth, the normalcy of passing fields and chasing the sun that became my sanctuary, are leaving me as the K3 from Beijing pulls into Yaroslavisky Station. I have never been so scared.

Twenty minutes is now a lifetime.