The Ghost of the Commute

There is a specific silence that lives in the middle of a crowd. It is not the absence of noise, but the absence of connection. I remember the way my father used to stand on the train platform, his coat buttoned to the chin, eyes fixed on a point just past the tracks. He was there, yet he was already gone, his mind pulled toward the office or the dinner table or the debts he didn’t speak of. We are all ghosts in transit, passing through one another like smoke through a screen. We leave behind the imprint of our hurry, the frantic energy of where we need to be, while the person we actually are stays behind, waiting for the platform to empty. We are always arriving, yet we are never quite present. If you stripped away the motion, the urgency, and the destination, what would be left of the body standing in the station? Is the person who waits the same as the person who arrives?

Von Christopher Trabado has taken this beautiful image titled The Rush Hour. He captures the blur of the many while holding onto the stillness of the one, reminding us that even in the thick of a crowd, we are fundamentally alone. Can you see the person standing still amidst the ghosts of the city?