There’s a unique moment on the subway sometimes, when two cars ride along the rails next to one another. Usually one is a local train and the other an express. There’s some unwritten rule that express trains have the right of way. It makes sense, they’re entire existence is meant to get people from point A to point B faster by skipping unnecessary stops in between. Why that means it’s okay to leave the local train sitting in a station for ten minutes waiting for express train passengers to arrive and make a transfer is beyond me. Don’t local passengers have just as much right to get to their destination as quickly as possible?
In any case, in this special moment when these two trains ride side by side, if you take a moment to look out the windows, which normally seem pointless in the dark tunnels underground, you will have a sense of floating. In the moments before one train takes the lead and speeds away, the two seem to be stopping in time to say hello. Where moments before the dark beams of the tunnels flashed by, now you have cars and windows bobbing along outside your window. In those frozen moments, you can look into the train across the way, if your own train has lost interest to you, and see a new world of travelers making their way through the world. They are somehow oblivious to your stares as they quietly talk to a friend or read their newspaper or cuddle their child. If you’re particularly lucky, you’ll catch a glimpse of a train performer in the midst of some wildly insane hip hop moves or frozen in a high C with their head thrown back. Occasionally, a school group will meander past and the excited children who always seem to be riding the train for the very first time will be waving enthusiastically at you with big grins across their face. If you catch their energy and return their wave, passengers in your own train may tilt their heads. With their backs to the window, they do not see the glimpses of another subway ride. To them, you are waving to a black nothingness and smiling at your own reflection. Perhaps one or two others on your train also wave. You can see who else is frozen in time with you. Maybe you catch their eye. A rare connection in a multitude of people too busy with their own lives to notice the life happening right next to them. Before you know it, the express train speeds ahead. One falls behind, the school children are on their way and their smiles are replaced with black.
Sometimes you see them again when the trains meet moments later across the subway platform. But who can remember a face seen floating through tunnels deep underground?
