Subway Edition

Although my feelings on the city as a whole are still a bit mixed, my opinion of the subway is something that I really wanted to express, as well as my words can offer. I think I say that about a lot of things here, but I really do feel as if I can't do this place justice. My little corners, certainly - I could tell you all about my apartment, and I could try to describe the church across the street, and even give you a fairly accurate impression of the brownstones on the next few streets over. But trying to describe the big things, the things that take my breath away . . . that's a little different. The subway is one place that I'm going to try hard to do justice to, though, in all its dirty, chaotic magic. Here are a few pictures I'd like to paint for you.

The first day I rode the subway, I took a train towards Manhattan to have a look around, and (as per my every day, ongoing quest) find the coffee shop. This particular train goes above ground for a while, coming across the bridge and winding its way through the upper parts of several buildings. First day, keep in mind, and I'm from Columbia, SC - the graffiti . . . oh my. The graffiti was one of the most wonderful things I've ever seen. Stack upon stack, layers of spectacular graffiti face the subway with all kinds of brightly colored drama, each telling their own little snippet of story that I'll never know but can certainly appreciate. I know next to nothing about graffiti - to my shame, all I really know is to call some of them "tags" - but I know that the mile-long vista of brightly colored, wildly stylized words and curves and angles really did take my breath away.

I think the sheer diversity of the subway is pretty amazing as well. At any point, I might hear four different languages and thirty different dialects; in any train car, I might see any style of dress on fifty different colors of people. It's funny how the subway both alienates and unites people - tonight, I saw two older Asian men who had clearly never spoken before talking about whatever movie one man was watching on a tiny DVD player in his lap. There's nothing more important to do, so to some degree it makes perfect sense to talk to the people next to you, learn their story, discover their culture. Maybe for the greater mass of us, however, we sit with our headphones in and our books out, literally brushing shoulders with hundreds of people a day, but perfectly content to exchange short glances of acknowledgment and keep to ourselves. I don't think it's a bad thing - in fact, as a small female in a big city, I'm happy to mind my own business - I just think the interpersonal dynamics are absolutely fascinating.

One image particularly sticks out in my head. At some point riding home, I sat across from a beautiful middle-aged Cuban man, rosary hanging off his chest, cane in hand, and an equally beautiful nine- or ten-year-old boy grasping onto his arm. I can't really explain what was so striking about it, and I don't mean beautiful as in attractive, exactly - but together, and in that context, in my new world, I felt like I had seen a brief glimpse of some incredible award-winning movie that just hadn't been made yet. He looked up at me once or twice with a kind of gravitas in his furrowed brow that I thought was deeply moving somehow. I wish I could have taken his picture, or asked him about his life, or even just conveyed my admiration. But like the city as a whole, there was not time enough before we went our separate ways.

There's a kind of ghost train effect that I think is really fascinating as well. Trains often run side by side, at least for a very short time, before separating around stations or before the track rises. Especially at night, in that low green light, you look across the gap, watching the struts fly by. While the rest of the world is moving at rapid speed past you, almost to the point that you can't make out any detail of the scenery around you, suddenly you see a train running next to you at a speed very like your own, with people much like yourself, like something between an alternate universe and a ghostly reflection. It's a strange sensation to say the least - somehow, seeing them there almost makes the whole thing lonelier, like they're the only real thing in the world and yet they're far enough away to make them impossible to reach.