I am sitting on a bench at Union Depot, where the air still tastes faintly of diesel and old stone.

The light this afternoon is soft, honey-gold, and leaning heavily against the brass rails that have guided decades of restless travelers. St. Paul sits like a cathedral of limestone and patience, its steep hills a quiet contrast to the glass-and-steel ambition of Minneapolis just across the river. I find myself tracing the worn edges of a vintage ticket stub I found tucked into a crevice of the wood, a small ghost of a journey taken when the rails were the only veins this country knew.
There is a peculiar sibling rivalry written into the skyline here, one sister looking back at the hearth while the other stares toward the horizon. Between them, the Mississippi flows as a shared pulse, indifferent to the names we give the banks. We are all essentially commuters, perpetually traveling the short, vital distance between the history that built us and the shimmering possibility of the next station.