When I don’t have a seat on the subway and I’m hanging onto the pole (eww, gross, insert swine flu joke here), it’s either stare at the floor, stare out the window across the way (which leads to staring at myself, which leads to quickly looking away lest those bags under my eyes so beautifully lit by the overhead fluorescents get me down) or stare at others. I don’t like staring at others too intensely, leftover from the mid-nineties when my parents packed me off to NYC for college and I attended a first-year orientation, that’s right it was “first-year” not “freshman” and the older, wiser seniors giving defensive New Yorker-ing lessons told us to never, ever look up from the sidewalk or we might risk getting raped or mugged. But I will slide my eyes up and down the car taking in “street style” or whatever the hell it is one does on the L train these days.
What was rare—no, extraordinary—about yesterday’s ride was that it was the first time I can recall not relying on my visual senses, because I found myself overwhelmed by the silence in the car. All the seats were full, but the train was not crowded. There were no teenagers or children on the train. Nearly everyone was engaged in their own, personal activities, from reading to ipod shuffling to staring into space, aside from one couple on the far end of the train who spoke in a low muffle. I sat there for the length of one stop, between Bedford and First Avenue, in a state of ecstasy once I noticed this. I might as well have been doing yoga, that’s how good I felt. Things like this do not happen in New York. Not on the train.
I related this story to some friends of mine later that day, excitedly. “It was pure zen!” I screamed.
My friends looked at me, concerned.
“Um, I think you need to get out of the city more often.”
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