In Between Transit (revised ver.)

Train stations have always felt like borrowed time to me. Spaces we pass through but never truly inhabit. We're allowed to exist there, but only temporarily, only in service of going somewhere else. The tension of in-between spaces, the pull of transitional movement has always drawn me in.

I stood at Hamamatsuchō Station watching people move like water through a narrow channel. I wasn't looking for anything in particular when I saw a man inside a noodle shop, eating udon while standing. His bowl sat on the narrow counter in front of him. Everyone around him was moving, flowing toward platforms and exits, and he was there, paused but not quite still. I wondered if he even tasted it, or if the noodles were just fuel, something to get through before the next train came.

Days later, at Nebukawa Station, I found myself waiting on a platform, and across the tracks I saw a woman sitting alone on a bench. She had nowhere urgent to be, or if she did, she wasn't letting it show. Her hands were folded in her lap. She was looking at nothing in particular, or maybe everything. The kind of waiting that doesn't check the clock every thirty seconds.

I keep thinking about these two people. I've been holding these two moments together, turning them over. Both were in transit. Both alone in public. Both waiting for something to take them elsewhere. But one was standing between movement and one was sitting in stillness, and somehow that difference felt enormous.

Maybe what I'm circling around is how we inhabit these liminal spaces—these thresholds that aren't quite departure and aren't quite arrival. Do we stand, ready to move the second the path clears? Or do we sit, claiming the in-between as its own kind of place?

I don't know which one I am. Some days I'm the standing man. Some days I wish I were the sitting woman. Most days I'm both, caught between the need to keep moving and the ache to just stop and breathe in these threshold spaces that belong to no one.

sentiments