The Ghost of the Platform

I remember waiting for the 6:12 train in a station that smelled of wet concrete and ozone. A woman stood near the edge of the platform, her coat collar turned up against the draft. She wasn’t looking at her phone or checking the schedule; she was just watching the tunnel, waiting for the dark to give way to the approaching light. In that moment, she seemed like a ghost of her own life, caught in the quiet friction between where she had been and where she was headed. We spend so much of our time in these transit spaces—liminal zones where we are neither here nor there, just passing through the machinery of our own days. It is a strange, hollow feeling, realizing that we are all just blurs in the periphery of someone else’s commute, moving toward destinations that will eventually become memories. We are always in motion, yet we are rarely ever truly present.

Kirsten Bruening has captured this exact feeling of transition in her work titled Old Days Pass Away. It is a beautiful reminder of how we drift through the world, leaving only echoes behind. Does this image make you feel like you are arriving, or are you already on your way out?