Jenna Hymes

You glance down the car, at your fellow passengers, then close your eyes. You put your hand firmly over the flap of your purse on your lap and try to remember what the people in the car around you look like. There’s that guy with the curly hair across from you, of course, the woman next to you wears a pink skirt and is listening to her ipod, you can hear the tinny strains of music coming from it. Further down the train is a mother with her child in a stroller, the child has dark hair and a bottle in his hand. A woman with a green purse, is leaning on the pole in the middle of the car, a man behind her tries to squeeze his hand behind her back to grab onto the pole. A teenage girl wears Converse sneakers across from you and is reading In Touch magazine. The woman next to her is leaning to read over the girl’s shoulder. Everyone on the subway is reduced to the clothes they are wearing, the books they are reading, the conversation they are having at that second.

You open your eyes and see that the woman leaning against the pole is older than you had thought, her hair is graying around the temples. The teenager across the aisle wears flip flops, not Converse. You had thought there was no one leaning against the door across from you, but there is a couple, the girl grabbing on to her boyfriend’s shoulders to steady herself, and a man, his back to you, facing the door. How could you have looked and not seen anything?

The train stops, your body sways as it screeches to a halt. You don’t need to listen to the announcement of what station is next, you know it by heart, you hear it but don’t hear it “Transfer is available to the 4, 5, 6, Shuttle to Times Square, Connection is available to Metro North.” People move out of the car all around you, you feel them leaving, other people come on. How could there be so many strangers in this city, let alone this world and all of them are thinking like you, have had childhoods and parents and hopes, and right now maybe they are looking at you and thinking about how you are a stranger and feeling disbelief that you are a real separate person who has had a long life before they stepped foot in this subway car and saw you, but of course you have and of course you did and how could anyone think you don’t exist like they do because you are the realest of them all.

You turn to the woman next to you. She holds her tiny ipod in her hand, rolling through songs. You try to catch which one she’s listening to, wondering what song could have such a throbbing bass that comes through even when straining out of her ear bud headphones. The woman glances over at you then, perhaps having felt your gaze on her. She puts a hand over her ipod, did she think you were going to take it from her? She shifts a little away from you, towards the guy on the other side of her, what could she be thinking? What is she seeing in your face? You turn and look ahead then, embarassed, though not sure why you should care what this stranger thinks. You will almost assuredly never see her again. Across the aisle a man in a black t-shirt is reading the Bible. You cannot see it is the Bible, but you guess it is, from the way his head is bent in concentration, the leather cover on the little book. You wonder what people read in the Bible, how it keeps them entertained on the train, how they can focus on religion when there is so much distraction all around.

You get up without thinking when it is your stop, no need to listen to an announcement or look at a map. You think about how you almost took the N train instead, and how when you first got on this train you worried that it would be slow and wished you had taken the N and what if this train got stuck because it’s so crowded and how could you breathe, stuck in a tunnel with so many people all around? You get up to leave the train, negotiating the tiny space and the people around you. They move back, you move forward, you mumble “excuse me. “ In front of you is a blond woman, hair down to the middle of her back. You had not noticed her before and now you only see her back, but you imagine her face, a pointed nose perhaps, surprisingly dark eyebrows. You never do see her face, as she walks away from you, down a different set of stairs in the station, but you never think “Oh my God, that woman doesn't have a face." Instead you create a face for her. Just as you created a face and thoughts for all those people on the train you didn’t see or didn’t look at and whose thoughts you will never hear.