Subway, Morning
On the morning subway, the view outside the window rushes past. I saw a line of shoulders like that person's. I rode one stop too far. That is how memory does its work. With no warning it appears at my back and takes me, for a moment, off onto a side road from where I was going. Around the time the scenery outside grew unfamiliar, I finally let out my breath.
Outside the subway window everything stands still like a photograph, yet the car itself is humming. In that hum I think of the alley cat I saw yesterday. No one called it, but it sat alone, watching the street. Neither gone off into the distance nor still quite there.
In that hum, I nearly missed the station where I had to get off. Like that cat, it seems I too sat a good while longer, unsure whether I was there or not.
A scene where the morning begins with the sound of subway doors closing. On my way to work, I often look at the shoulders of people leaning by the windows.
With every closing door, a different morning must be opening. I too now stand by the window and find myself looking not at the passing scenery but at the line of the shoulders within it.
On the subway to work, when I see the line of a passing shoulder, my feet stop without my meaning them to. In that gap, a station has gone by. I can hear the passenger beside me turning the pages of a book on their knees.
Coming out of the tunnel, the sunlight cut across the window. In that moment the bookmark the person beside me was holding fell. I started to reach for it and stopped.