It begins at the door. You’ve been up for half an hour already, getting dressed and brushing your teeth and packing your lunch and eating breakfast, the lynchpins in your daily attempt to convince yourself that you don’t just want to fall back into bed and sleep until normal people are finishing lunch — you’ve been up, but until you reach the door you are still definitively home.
Once you get out the door, though, no matter how many times you stop and turn and run back into the house for something you’ve forgotten — sunglasses, phone, lunch — you’re no longer home. There’s no going back. You are officially en route, in transit, in the midst of getting from one place to another place that will help you get to another place.
Out the door and down the street, fumbling to put on your sunglasses because it may be an ungodly hour of the morning but it’s already bright, the sun high and shining and getting ready to call down the full intensity of its sweltering wrath. There’s a reason sane people aren’t supposed to build cities on swamps.
Four blocks away, and if you’re lucky you swing up to the bus stop a minute before the bus makes a wide turn and swings clumsily around the corner. If you’re unlucky you wait, shifting from one foot to another, glancing up hopefully every time you think you hear the distinctive rumble of the engine. (Garbage trucks are similar enough to confuse you, all whirs and rumbles and the occasional chirping stop, but most sedans sound like a wave just before it crashes; they don’t fool you into fumbling for your bus fare.)
Leaving the house three minutes earlier can mean the difference between a one minute wait and a ten minute wait. It took you four weeks to get the timing down and even then, the bus is still late on Fridays.
The vinyl seat sticks to your skin when you sit down; your shorts only cover approximately one-fifth of the surface area of your thighs, which probably makes them inappropriate for work but you’re engaged in a delicate balancing act, here. Business Casual vs Summerwear, Propriety warring with Weather; too little clothing and you risk the disapproval of your supervisor, but too much and the fabric will end up stuck, sodden, to your skin. When you’re not kidding yourself, you know which has won; your coworkers wear jeans and t-shirts and your supervisor comes in once a week, if that, and you’re only temporary, anyway.
Really, they should count themselves lucky you haven’t shown up in gym clothes. Humidity is an unfair opponent.
You stare out the window as the bus jerks its way through traffic, stopping more often than starting. You could have walked this route, but that would have involved waking up half an hour earlier and you’re far enough behind on sleep as it is, your body trying and failing each night to compensate for the minutes and hours you missed the night before. Better to wait, in the mornings, and exist in stops and starts. You’ll walk it in the afternoon, in any case, because you have better things to do than wait for more buses and anyway, you need to make up for the fact that you spend most of your time sitting down, living your life in stasis — except for these times, that is, rushing from one transient destination to another: house to bus, bus to Metro, Metro to work.
One escalator is always broken, inevitably; if you’re lucky, it’s only stalled, nothing more than a glorified staircase. If you’re unlucky, the yellow gates will be up, workmen warning you that you must share space with the upward-bound crowd, squeezing to the right in an attempt to avoid handbags and briefcases, more than twice as slow now that you can’t push ahead of the molasses-slow movers in front of you.
Here is how to go down an escalator: leaning forward, left hand skimming the rail for balance, your toes hanging off the edge of the step so that you’re practically on the next one already, sliding off your sunglasses one-handed as you hurtle from sunlight into shade. Keep your legs moving, stay tilted; if leaning one degree farther forward wouldn’t potentially be fatal, you’re doing it wrong.
Down, down, down, hoping to god you won’t have to slow down because of the people ahead of you (stand on the right<, why do they never stand on the right) because having to delay now can mean running up to the platform just as the train pulls away, its doors closed and laughing at you.
A digital display tells you that the turnstile has swallowed your hard-earned money; the trip may or may not be worth it, dollars and cents creeping to a greater and greater total the longer you do this, the more you settle into this routine. Working from home would have its advantages, you think.
Maybe you miss the train; maybe one pulls in just as you run up, maybe you have to wait two, three, five minutes. Maybe the train is delayed and you have to stand, waiting, staring at the electric numbers on the arrival board as more and more frustrated would-be travelers crowd onto the platform and the next train has been supposed to arrive in three minutes for fifteen minutes now.
Eventually, another train will come. The forces of commuting and tourism will not be permanently delayed by something as paltry as mechanical engineering.
The doors slide open and you wish the swarm of people exiting would be a little faster about it, would shove their way into the station like they’d been released from prison by a slingshot. There always seem to be more and more of them, so many that you have no idea how they all fit in a single train car. You’d be impressed if this was clowns in a car at the circus — or maybe terrified; clowns are scary — but this is Commuting. It’s serious business. If they take too much time getting out then the doors will close before everyone waiting on the platform manages to wiggle through the doors.
You look to see if there might, fortuitously, be a seat left open by the grace of the Metro gods, but to no avail. The Metro gods are cranky this early in the morning — too many tourists, not enough coffee. Instead you stand, hooking your elbow around a pole so you can still try to read, flicking pages and accidentally bumping your purse into the man next to you every time the train turns a corner.
There is no place as simultaneously crowded and isolated as public transportation. Making eye contact with a stranger is rare; conversation is shocking. We ensconce ourselves in our own personal bubbles of books and thoughts and iPods and people we already know, avoiding the instability of a fleeting connection with someone who will disappear at the next stop, never to be seen again (by you, by us).
(Unless, of course, that person is wearing a Doctor Who t-shirt, in which case all bets are off.)
Starting and stopping; the Metro resolves itself into the pattern of your entire journey so far, all the while filling and emptying and filling and emptying and continually moving along, your presence there entirely superfluous to its progress. It consumes you only apathetically; you are the one willingly sacrificing yourself, throwing yourself into the internal cavities of a giant subterranean beast and churning along placidly until you decide you’ve had enough of recycled air and other people.
The doors open and you angle yourself to get out as quickly as possible, ready to squeeze through whatever gaps you can find between other peoples’ hips and elbows. You find yourself still blocked from the freedom you can spy just out of reach, and you wonder if this is how Eurydice felt on the trip out of Hades, silently willing Orpheus to walk faster and <em>not look back, damnit.</em>
Doors, floors, escalators, platform again: you throw yourself into the belly of another indifferent beast.
Time is time is time is ticking along, the minutes you spend here adding up with every page you turn in your book — a novel, a collection of essays, a cookbook; anything interesting enough to allow you to pretend you’re somewhere else, but not so involving that you forget you’re here and miss your stop — and the longer you spend here, the later you have to spend at work, and the less time you have at home. It all adds up.
One last stop and you’re almost free; the train shudders to a halt and you ride out the aftershocks with the ease of practice, bending your knees and letting the momentum carry you one step closer to the door, narrowly avoiding a collision. Your bag swings, heavy on your shoulder and probably capable of concussing the woman sitting closest to you. You should be careful of that.
It’s easy to shove your way through the crowds when you’re so close, pushing through the turnstile and running to the escalator, walking up five times more slowly than you went down, because you’re stuck in an inexorable tide of people and they’re slow, so slow, and gravity can’t help you when you’re going in this direction. No matter, though, because there’s sunlight just ahead and barely fifty feet to go after that until you hit the doors and security after that, x-rays and metal detectors, and then you’re down the hall with your security pass and you’re in and all the stopping and running and waiting and rushing is wiped clean in favor of a single, unambiguous start.
(It ends at the door.)
It’s 8:20 in the morning, and you have seven hours to go before you do it all again in reverse.
[Original tags on this post: commute, creativity instead of kvetching?,interning, totally self-indulgent]
[Original tags on this post: commute, creativity instead of kvetching?,interning, totally self-indulgent]
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