I feel that anyone who rides the train with any given regularity, and I suppose by that I mean on a daily basis or maybe even on a weekly basis, (though who am I to judge what regularity is), will eventually develop a real, tangible association with most, if not all, of the stops that they pass. It'd be impossible not to. You pass the same ones day in and day out. Even those that lie beyond where you get off, beyond your personal radar as it were, still exist in your mind, if only as those dots you stare at on the map on the wall when the train is too crowded to read the paper. There are those stops that are the signposts of your journey, wherever it is you may be heading. The ones where you think to yourself, "Okay, 51^st, two more stops and I'm home free." You may get off at them every once and a while, but never so often as to develop a real relationship or familiarity. They are like those coworkers from other departments at your office. You know them in passing, you wave in the hallway, make small talk with them in the elevator. Maybe you even have a story about them from the office Halloween party. Ultimately however, they're strangers to you. Then there are, of course, "your" stops. The ones that are bookends of your trip. The stations that you know like the back of your hand. You've seemingly spent lifetimes waiting for that damn train to come and have your spot where you always like to stand while you are waiting. These are the ones where you can easily figure out exactly how late you'll be if you leave the office or the apartment a minute or minute and a half later than usual. If they are stops that your friends live by, they eventually become extensions of those people. Perhaps they even take on their qualities in your imagination.    

     Finally, there are the stops that you used to make. For whatever reason, you don't get off at them anymore. Maybe you moved, or you switched jobs. Maybe your routine simply changed. These are stops that you used to make, with great frequency for that matter, for reasons that have ceased to exist. These places that your life was once intrinsically connected to, simply fluttered away. Whatever the reason may have been, you catch yourself gazing into this shell of the past whenever the 6 or 1, or whichever train you take, rests at one of them for a moment. You find that you're whisked away to another place in time. In your mind's eye, you see yourself getting off and going about your business the way you used to. Day in, day out. Or maybe you see yourself disembarking at that particular station on a distant Christmas Eve with a bag of packages or on a not so distant Fourth of July, on your way to watch the fireworks. These are the stops that are like old friends, former lovers, or even just past roommates. Those individuals who you used to know so well. Those who you thought you would always know, yet for some reason, life transpired differently than expected. Your paths diverged. You lost touch. These are the stations that will forever be connected to a specific point in your life and when the doors finally do close, you are hurried back into the here and now, back into reality, leaving the ghost of the past, a disembarked passenger, waiting on the platform.