Traveling on trains is always a bit like watching the movie Slacker on fast-forward (or, if you’re traveling backwards, as I am in this case, rewind); you get to share about two or three seconds of the lives of those outside the windows of the passing train - in a visual sense, at least.
And then you never see them again.
Two women have what looks to be a heated discussion on an otherwise empty city sidewalk. A seemingly naked man leans out the window of his fourth-floor tenement apartment, surveying his situation. A man uses a pay phone behind an abandoned brick building.
Who are these people? What are they up to? What are their lives like? Are they in love? Are they broken-hearted? Are they mourning the loss of someone special? Are they plotting the loss of someone special?
The entire spectrum of a human life cycle unfolds before your eyes, in two-second snippets of sight.
Everyone has a story that they can tell. Some people have many. But I can only watch and wonder, attending to my own unfolding as I roll backwards past them through time.
All those people, all those lives where are they now?
- The Smiths, “Cemetery Gates”