This platform is old and wooden planks, streaked in yellow paint and sprinkled in piles of salt. We wait. We sniffle. We breathe steam into the dry and jagged morning air.

We are the winter weekday drones. We stare at our devices and float away in their tiny puddles of pixels. We judge with our thumbs, swiping our gut reactions in a daze.

Two headlights in the distance. A squealing, shrieking train rushes toward the platform. Some of us watch as it nears, and others step forward. They turn their backs when it stampedes past in a mechanical roar, churning up a cloud of snow and mist.

Across the platform, a man in a puffy black coat appears at the top of a staircase. Fighting his bag strap with his shoulder. Walking stiffly with winter boots. Pressing up his glasses and panting with effort.

“Does that side go to the city?” he shouts across the tracks, to no one in particular.

“Yes,” a woman replies, through a paisley scarf.

The man nods his thanks. Then he swims his shoulder strap on again. He turns toward the underpass that connects the two sides of the platform. A 100-yard horseshoe with two sets of stairs.

Then: another two headlights in the distance. The platform stirs to life. We all inch forward, double-checking the time so as not to get our hopes up.

It is our train.

Shoulder Strap starts his dash. He’s nylon swishes and loose-change jingles down the first staircase.

Some of us look at each other for confirmation that this is indeed happening, yes it is. And the train churns to a stop.

“Run, buddy, you’ll miss it!” someone yells, and a few laughs break up our otherwise quiet merge into the train cars.

Through the windows, we watch as Shoulder Strap breaches onto the platform from the second staircase. He’s a gasping, cursing, hold-that-train spectacle — bouncing at so many speeds he looks like he’s made of ten bags of Jell-O.

But he makes it onto the first car. He pushes up his fogged glasses, taking a deep breath. Then he plops onto a seat.

As the train begins to move, the car breaks into a round of applause. Shoulder Strap smiles and waves as we all hurtle toward the city in the gray dawn.