Today’s soundtrack: I may be wrong, but then again I may be right
Today at 7:22pm: ascending stairs



If you are rigid on the subway, you will collapse. Lock your body and the motion of the train will knock you down.

So you relax, though your feet are planted firmly on the ground, and let the sharp vibrations go through you, like the proverbial tree bending in the wind. You lean against the door or a pole, those few square inches of surface contact giving you the extra balance to stand.

If a camera was fixed to the interior of the train, moving along with it but focused on you, it might look like you were having a slow spasm. Body swaying, shoulders shifting, head nodding this way and that. All around you, people seated in various states of wakefulness. And there’s you, standing and lurching, doing what you have to do to not fall down. Without the context of the subway it would not be clear why you were moving in that way.

I took the train back from JFK by myself, carrying nothing and with headphones on. After raising the volume and closing my eyes, the grimy subway car and everything and everyone around me just fell away and disappeared. I felt myself in blackness, standing still but moving, being tugged at and jolted by unseen forces, anesthetized by the music that drowned everything out. Sooner or later I’d get where I was going.