Headed home by train

Here, for now
Toronto, ON
January 2019
This photo originally shared on Instagram

The scene: Toronto's Union Station, Wednesday, 5:07 p.m. The Via train back to London has been delayed, and we're sitting on the track waiting to get going. I stare across the station and find myself wondering about the folks on the Go commuter train on the parallel track. Hundreds of thousands of people come through this place every day, and every single one of them has a story. I can see a few of them waiting, just like me, by the windows of their train, settling in for a hopefully comfortable ride home after a long day in the big city.

I imagine that, like me, they left well before sunrise and are returning after sunset. I imagine they, too, found themselves walking silently through the perpetually-under-construction belly of this place, the only sound the relentless drumbeat of dirty boots on dirty industrial flooring. I assume their heads were down, avoiding eye contact with strangers, their only interaction the occasional brush of someone's backpack as everyone jostled for position in the station's narrow, twisty corridors.

I don't have my "real" camera with me today. I've been trying to lighten my load on these marathon day-trips. All I have is my smartphone, and shooting through a dirty window from a fully-lit train car isn't much of a recipe for photographic excellence. But the shove-the-phone-right-up-to-the-window trick sometimes turns the impossible into the possible. So I press into the cold glass (pro tip: the rubbery outer case on an OtterBox is super useful when composing this way) and line everything up.

It's hard to feel poetic about a place like this, but the resulting photo makes me smile. Because on a cold, grey, wet day in a cold, grey, wet place where most people are trying their hardest to pretend they're all alone, I found light and color, and hope that maybe the world around us isn't as harsh as we think it is.

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