Train Culture

Before I forget...

The conductor on the 4:48 a.m.'s even Tickets please, Tickets, please or the conductor on the 5:20 p.m.'s sassy Have your little tickets out! All the little tickets, Have 'em out! and the feisty redhead who everyday, without fail, answers him with "I've got my little ticket out!"... the gentleman who sat next to me last week reeking of alcohol, who sipped furtively from a 5th of something then chased it with Slice. Or the construction worker buddies whose stories all involve inclement weather and getting totally trashed. Then there's the highstrung woman who plays a game on her cell phone for the entire duration of the ride back to Baltimore in the evening, the one that goes beep, beep, beep while weary commuters try to sleep. I dreamed once that she was pointing her phone at me while it made that infernal noise, a truly devilish grin on her face...

I will miss the subway couple, who between them, might have a full set of teeth. They are always laughing, and whether or not it is to the same degree, they love each other. I am sure the man is an alcoholic. I have a collection of "Train Lovers" whose kisses have made me yearn, whose hand holding has split the fault line in my heart, making me tear up as the locomotive chugged along the rails under indigo and orange skies.

Will I ever sleep that way again? The kind of slumber that mimicks death in its finality and totality. I always knew I was close to home by the bends in the track, but more and more, in the course of the last weeks, my body has been forgetting that it and the train are not one, and I have struggled not to drift back away into the murky dreams I have when I'm riding, almost forgetting to disembark. I rock in time with the steel boxes,used to the swaying. In some ways, It is the only life I know.

I have thought to myself several times that if I died in some wreck, or the cars were overtaken by a malevolent entity (terrorists, Jesse James type criminals, etc.) that I would meet my end with people whose faces I've committed to memory, but whose names I do not know.