Stations

On Saturday I stood on the platform, 

a stage for all of us,

watched some girls play around,

pretending they wanted to jump.

I thought, I wonder if that “danger de mort” sign 

is just to deter us from jumping down there 

or if you can actually get electrocuted?

(Excuse my ignorance, there are no trains where I come from)

Yesterday: 

Headline: A teenager in Oslo dies from electric shock on traintracks.

Oh, I guess it is. Danger de mort. 

How often are we all, strangers on the same journey so near danger de mort and we do not realise it? It doesn’t really cross our minds.

And what else.

How many of you have ever wondered, how many people are at this moment, going from the same station to the same destination? How intertwined are our destinies, despite differences, whichever they might be. 

How odd it is, with all our stories, all our interactions, I have never considered that Khaled the baker there and Yann the electrician with his son Éric and old Monsieur et Madame là bas avec le chien, and me, we’re all going the same route? Same departure, same destination, same time. 

We are in this journey together, without knowing, through the veins of a city. Like the blood pumping through Paris, literally, keeping her alive, in the deep, dark intestines of the luminous city of love.

All just busy passing through station after station after station, cautiously ignoring the less fortunate ones who sleep, linger, beg, in the arteries of París. Did they not, them too, once have a departure and a destination?

Station after station we go on.

Station after station.

Until we step off

And leave our common humanity behind,

Rolling forward along the tracks.