By Olive Saraf
There is a feeling, waiting on the subway platform, a bad feeling that you will jump into the tracks. You don’t know why – it is just a feeling of gravity pulling you past the yellow, bumpy line, down into waste valley and rodent village. It is the impulse of the New Yorker to keep moving, no matter where it takes you, no matter how far you fall, even if it kills you. Just jump. Don’t jump.
I’m standing on the platform at the 72nd street station on Central Park West. Therapy has made me hyperaware. Every time I leave the office on the first floor of the apartment building on 70th street, I feel the pensiveness you feel after a therapy session, that you could see right through people like God, and they wouldn’t even know it. Of course, it’s also the evening, so maybe I’m just delusional.
The train rolls in on the downtown track below me. The concrete shakes and the walls rattle with sound. The screams of the track reverberate and reverberate into a neverending echo. I press my back into the wall for stability. My train arrives only a few moments later. I caught the B first today; last week, it was the C. The B train usually has those orange and yellow seats facing alternating directions. One rule of the subway is that if there is ever a seat open at the end of the row, you take it. I take the one opposite the door with a clear view of the scratched, blurry window to distract me throughout my five-minute ride.
There are around eight or nine other people in the subway car. Three of them wear headphones – only one with wires. Seven, including the headphone users, are looking at their phones. Only one is reading a paper magazine. None dare to make eye contact. One of the women with her headphones in, maybe around 45, wears a striped yellow blouse that looks like it’s from TJMaxx and dark-washed mom jeans. She listens to the Ezra Klein Show, nodding to herself every time she hears something mildly inspirational. Her family mocks her, night after night, as she drones on about the latest podcast she’s listened to, giving a well-worn speech to her kids about how they are the future of this country.
Another woman gets on at 81st street wearing cheetah print boots, a camo tank top, and a floral purse. She listens to her music, the sound bleeding loudly out of broken headphones. She sits down and pulls out a tinfoil-wrapped burrito, its smell leaking into the car almost as pervasively as the sound of her music. Her presence phases no one in the subway car. I look right at her. I know she won’t look back at me. To look back is to acknowledge that you care, that you want other people to care, and she has no care in the world.
A man sits directly across from me wearing a gray suit and a striped tie. I avert my eyes towards the glum advertisements lining the top of the vessel’s walls: Fresh Direct, T-Mobile, The Museum of Sex. Like I said, never make eye contact, but he looks right at me. I feel his eyes branding themselves into my forehead, slowly trailing a line towards my chest. I stare into his eyes, waiting for him to realize my glare and move his eyes away in embarrassment, pretending he’d never been looking there in the first place. He doesn’t catch my eye. He only looks away as he gets up to exit at 86th street, probably going home to his wife and a plate of leftovers wrapped in tinfoil in the fridge.
I flinch at the slight, chilled breeze from the doors as they close. I stay in my seat and glance back up at the posters on the ceiling. I read the signs in my head, word after word, breathing in and out. I look around at the people on the train. There is a whole new crop of New Yorkers on their way uptown, waiting to arrive at their next location. They’ll be back on this train again tomorrow or next week. Then, back to the above-ground world where they walk with the same haste as the train, feeling noticed and invisible at the same time. I move forward to the edge of my seat and stand up. My stop is coming soon.
The train arrives at 96th street. I ground my feet into the floor as the train halts to a stop, feeling the invincibility of a New Yorker who has no need for the metal pole beside her – balanced. I get off the train and, once again, I feel the urge to fall back into its wind towards the depths of the vibrating tracks. The iron and steel below are blackened by rust and New York sludge – a void begging to be discovered, begging me to lay down in its filth, arms spread out like a snow angel, and wait for the concrete to move me. Just jump. Don’t jump.