A Meditation on Subways

If you ever want to see perfect synchronicity, go to the metro or the train or even to the rapid station traveling up and down Shaker Boulevard. That girl with her dull-rusting hair and that guy with the crinkled Nike tennis shoes move together in perfect harmony. Why go see synchronized swimming or go to see a baseball game or a dance, to see human movement at its finest. Go down the grimy stairs with fading blue strips, pass the elderly Asian man playing the string instrument with sound that fills the tiled halls, hold tightly to the scratched and cankerous silver pole and sway and watch everyone else sway with you. It might be hard at first as you are jolted forward, using your liquid arms to stabilize stabilize stabilize, but once you lean into it, get your feet growing roots, you’ll see. In the hoard of strangers, confined in your metal cage, you can feel it and maybe they can too. Maybe the phones and the books and the restless shaking of legs with break you from your daze and you’ll see and you can be with me. You can see the bobbing of heads to the beat of the clickclacking against the tracks and the jolting to the wheezing of the breaks. You can pick out that something’s off when the man in the fading blue shirt strides down the center, defying the rules that bind us to the subway train, the rules of gravity. We move together because the net force of our cart enacts on all of us, so why isn’t he bound as we are?