I’m never quite sure how I get here, but I always arrive at the same place, at the same time. Fade from black as the scene slowly begins to manifest. First as lines, as a draftsman’s composition of perspective space. The scene forms itself as a platform, edged by columns receding towards a vanishing point. The location becomes recognizable, a subway platform for arriving and departing trains. Next, tone, color and sound complete the mise en scene. Finally, with the arrival of the first digression, the platform is transformed into a stage. A stage to act out, and by acting out, to consume the detritus of thought left in our minds at the end of the day. A stage for thoughts where they can play themselves out in ten to fifteen second vignettes.

The platform stages the manifestation of random thoughts in your head. Untethered thoughts that swirl unformed and unframed. On this stage, they are released. The stage is peopled with the faces you always see, yet never remember. At the deli, on the bus, in line at the newsstand, waiting at the crosswalk, on advertising placards in the subway cars. It is a separate process that your brain performs surreptitiously, unconsciously. Specific, yet random people remembered to be paired with a particular thought, a certain outfit.

The thoughts always come clothed in white. Some thoughts appear as diaphanous remnants, an ethereal presence wandering the stage – never fully formed and never fully absent. Others appear fully formed in the midst of performance. They are either unbothered or unaware of the change of clothes and the change of scenery. Others appear lost in thought. Bespoke in white; perhaps looking for other actors, perhaps looking for an audience.

Sometimes, I even think that there are porters who clean up the leftover debris of thoughts.

And then there are, of course, thoughts whose intentions and meaning will remain a mystery.

“that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of the day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions.”

-Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles