ODDITIES

I don’t quite know when I technically became a permanent resident of the subway.

    It wasn’t something I decided one day. It was a metamorphosis of sorts – one that started when I decided to move away from the city. I had always been a commuter – with rising rent prices, it had become impossible to live in the vicinity of the office, so I had to give in to the inevitable block of time that would bookend every shift. The job was too good to quit, and I had already worked there for years. I suppose I feared change, and the move was already enough change for me, so I decided to succumb to the subway.
    The commute was a long one. It took almost two hours one way on a good day. Gone were the days of three quick stops on an uptown express train. At first, it irked me that almost four of my eighteen waking hours were spent stuck in a dirty steel tube underground. After a few months, however, something started to change.
    It started with people-watching. Having given up the dopamine-fuelled annoyance of a cell phone years ago, whenever I forgot whatever book I had been reading, my only remaining option was to quietly observe my fellow passengers. City folk don’t particularly like when you stare at them, so this activity is best approached with a measure of caution. The last thing I wanted was a confrontation. In fact, I had deliberately started wearing more unassuming neutral clothes to make myself blend into the background as much as possible, alongside a pair of mirrored sunglasses to aid my covert observations, as well as to help with the constant lingering headache induced by the neon lights.
         The types of people you see on a subway train provide an interesting cross-section of city life. There are, of course, the commuters in their suits and ties or their boiler suits, their work uniforms with name-tags identifying them as “Dave” or “Jonathan”, their tired expressions knowing that there is a slim chance this day will be any different to the one that came before it, and before, and before. Few of them are like me, however – their journey is often done after half a dozen stops, and they disappear from my life just as swiftly and impersonally as they entered it.
         Those who fascinate me the most, however, are the outliers. The people who give the subway its reputation for being a place of lawlessness. I once saw a woman with an inflatable crocodile get trapped in the closing doors. The train was delayed by three minutes and forty-four seconds. The inflatable burst from the weight of the steel doors. I felt a little sorry for it when its cartoonish face sagged downwards as the air whistled out of it like a dying breath.
         There was an old man once with a pet parrot perched on his shoulder sat across me. He was asleep, but the bird was very awake and was constantly shouting profanities in its weird inhuman voice. For an odd moment, I had felt as if the bird was watching me.
    After a while, I started to enjoy it. It was like stepping into a radio that only caught fragments of different channels. At any given day, during any given moment, there were dozens of glimpses of stories, of other people’s lives, sharing a train carriage with me, no matter how briefly. The impersonality of it all became a strange kind of appeal to me – quietly watching, speculating, imagining. I became enthralled by the pair of women whom I overheard talking about a man who had been cheating on both of them at once with the other. I wanted to hear what happened next in the story about magical giraffes that a four-year-old girl was telling her mother. I wanted to know if that stain on the old man’s shirt was blood or ketchup. I wanted to know the story behind the college student’s arm cast with a message scrawled in purple marker saying to “get well soon, you clumsy dumbass” followed by a lopsided smiley face. The beauty of it all was that I never could find out, and that I never will.
         I suppose it all changed one night when I fell asleep on the train ride home. This was not the first time this has happened – I was often tired from a long day at work and found myself drifting off into a quick nap, often being awoken by the announcement for my station – but for some reason, this time I couldn’t find it in me to keep my eyes open. The train carriage was almost completely empty apart from a few other commuters dotted here or there, and the bench-seat looked to be mostly devoid of strange liquids and stains, so I lay down and let my eyelids grow heavy.
         When I woke up, however, something was different. For one, I felt like I had slept for far longer – and much deeper – than usual. I felt a strange grogginess that I didn’t usually feel after a short nap, and I even realised that I had dreamt – something foggy and esoteric about driving down a highway with no beginning or end. I checked the time – it was five in the morning. I had slept through the entire night on the dirty bench-seat of a subway train. It was too late now to go back home – at this point it was closer to the workday starting anyway.
    So, I stayed on the train. I watched the early morning commuters start to fill up the cabin as I rode on towards my destination; the train having looped around many times whilst I was asleep, nobody even batting an eye. The one slightly sad thing about the big city is that people have less empathy. All the care about is themselves and their day. They are scared of confrontation, and all they want to do is keep to themselves. I don’t blame them. I find that even the kindest people instinctually look away from anything they don’t want to think too hard about or get involved in.
    I arrived to the office feeling different. Aside from the fact that I clearly looked like I had slept in my clothes, I suddenly felt a strange desire to retreat back into the tunnels of the subway, to listen to the grinding of steel wheels against the iron rails, to become one of the anonymous commuters again, to silently observe the stories of my fellow passengers whose names I will never know, watching, listening, imagining.
    When the day ended, I was tired again, and once again I found my eyes growing heavy. For some reason, I felt no urge to go back to my apartment. I had never liked it to begin with – it was nothing more than a cheap utilitarian shoe-box that I had only chosen out of practicality and price – and in comparison to the warm, dark subway, it seemed positively repulsive. I lay down on the bench seat again and let myself drift off to sleep.
         Before I knew it, it had been a week before I had even gone home. There was something about the lull of the subway that lured me in. Neither home nor my job invited me quite as much as the dark tunnels and anonymity of the miles of subway tunnels. I slept on the bench-seats as day blurred into night. I washed my clothes and body in an old gym at the terminus of one of the lines, far at the fringes of the city in an industrial estate. I spent the days watching people come and go, conducting my own strange sort of urban anthropology.
         Eventually, I stopped coming to work. In all honesty, I don’t think anyone noticed. I had always been a solitary person, and water-cooler small-talk was never exactly my thing. I had finally become one with the city, a permanent part of what is usually only a temporary segment of peoples’ lives. The steel and the iron and the concrete, the stale smell of sweat and dirt, the musty air conditioning and the wetness of the air marked by the breath of dozens of strangers. The commuters around me still think I’m one of them, in my work-clothes with dark circles under my eyes, as I look at the floor and watch them out of the corner of my eye, imagining their stories. Little do they know that for them, the subway consumes only part of their day. My life, on the other hand, had been swallowed whole by it.