Railway stations are rarely quiet.
Even when nobody is speaking, they have their own vocabulary.
Footsteps.
Brakes.
Announcements delivered in a voice calm enough to suggest that missing your train is a minor administrative detail.
A suitcase with one damaged wheel.
The distant metallic sound of something arriving before you can see it.
Stations are built around movement.
Perhaps that is why an empty one feels so strange.
I once found myself standing on a platform with nobody else in sight.
It was late.
Not dramatically late. Nothing good ever begins with a writer insisting how dramatically late something was.
It was simply late enough for the day to have lost interest.
The station was still open.
The lights were on.
A timetable displayed departures for people who had apparently made better decisions and gone home hours earlier.
I remember listening.
That is the thing about silence.
It is almost never silent.
A building continues without us.
Ventilation moves air through empty rooms.
Lights hum.
Somewhere behind a locked door, machinery performs a task nobody waiting for the last train will ever think about.
The station did not feel abandoned.
It felt indifferent.
I have always liked places that do not need people in order to exist.
Hotels after checkout.
Restaurants before opening.
City streets before the first delivery van arrives.
And railway stations when the platforms are empty.
We usually experience places through their purpose.
A station is where we leave.
Or arrive.
Or wait.
Remove the journey and the building becomes something else.
For a moment, I stopped thinking about where the tracks went.
I wondered instead how many people had stood exactly where I was standing.
How many had arrived too early.
How many had missed the train.
How many had watched someone leave and remained on the platform longer than necessary.
Places collect moments without keeping records of them.
Perhaps writers do something similar.
We arrive later.
We look around.
We notice a bench, a clock, an empty platform.
Then we begin asking questions the place has no obligation to answer.
A train eventually appeared.
The station became a station again.
Doors opened.
A few tired people stepped onto the platform.
Someone checked their phone.
Someone else looked immediately for the exit.
The silence disappeared so quickly that I almost wondered whether I had imagined it.
I boarded the train.
For several minutes, I watched the empty platform through the window.
Nothing happened there.
I wrote it down anyway.
— D. Vaen