Sometimes you go home, on a 7 hour train ride, and you grab a book. It’s about pilots and airplains. And you misplace yourself in a world that is not yours and will never be, a world of aircrafts and of flying, of clouds and of driving tones of metal through the sky.

And someone near you is taking out a small handbag. He starts tearing up the old unuseful papers he kept, thinking he will need them someday. He tears them up in a rythmic move, like a ritual, for half an hour. After the noise stops you realize he’s breathing rarely and deeply, making a sound that just grabs you out of your book.

‘I am a deep person’, you say to yourself. ‘I read books about worlds I dream of, I try to understand people I will never meet, so i can learn from their stories. But what can I say about this man here? Eventhough he’s ignorant enough not to realize he’s disturbing my reading with his noice and sounds, he surely has a dream of his, a story to tell.’

You smile to him. And he greets you back, with a robotic voice. You’re surprised by the new sound, you never heard that before. Then you realize he’s talking with the help of a small machine. He has it in his hand and, when he’s pushing a button, the machine starts vibrating. He puts it by the neck and the vibrations manage to move those thin muscles that produce the sound of voice.

‘I have a cancer’, he sais. ‘I was saved by the doctors, but they had to leave a hole in my neck. Using the machine, this is the only way I can speak now. I got it from the president of the country, we were colleagues in highschool. I don’t seem human anymore with this voice. It’s pulling me back from the real world. I lost the respect of my wife and my children, I’m having big troubles with them. Now i’m just travelling.’

After the unusual conversation you go back to your book.

In the crowd there are so many people that can mean something for the world. You may never know who they are. And sometimes not even they know this.

Antoine de saint-exupery – Vol de nuit