The Weight of Transit

We are always between places. The street is a thin line drawn between where we have been and where we are expected to arrive. We carry our lives in folders, in bags, in the set of our shoulders. It is a heavy thing, this expectation of being somewhere else. In the city, the noise is constant, yet there is a singular silence in the person who walks alone, lost in the rhythm of their own stride. We pass one another like ghosts in the gray light, each of us holding onto a piece of work, a secret, or a destination that no one else can see. The pavement does not remember our footprints. We are only here for a moment, suspended in the transit, before the city swallows the movement and leaves only the echo of a footfall. What remains when the folder is finally set down?

Keith Goldstein has captured this stillness in his image titled Jamison. It is a quiet study of a man caught in the middle of a city that never stops to look. Does the weight of the day feel lighter when you see it held by someone else?