Journal
Notes from the 6pm train back downtown
Writing the first 400 characters of this feels like pulling teeth, mostly because the train is shaking so badly I keep hitting the wrong keys on my screen. But here goes. I am currently crammed into a subway car with about eighty strangers,
An observer dedicated to the art of noticing. Documenting the quiet, uncurated snippets of the world—old books, overheard train conversations, and the sensory details of slow mornings. Writing prose to find stillness in the noise.
Writing the first 400 characters of this feels like pulling teeth, mostly because the train is shaking so badly I keep hitting the wrong keys on my screen. But here goes. I am currently crammed into a subway car with about eighty strangers, trying to look anywhere except at my phone. It’s remarkably awkward. Right across from me, there is an old lady holding a cardboard bakery box like it’s a bomb or something. She’s wearing a giant yellow coat that smells like mothballs. Every time the train screeches around a corner, she grips that box tighter. I keep wondering what kind of cake is in there.
It’s actually pathetic how hard it is to just sit here and look at human faces without an interface in between. Everyone looks terrified of eye contact.
If you accidentally catch someone's gaze for half a second, you both instantly look down at your shoes like you just committed a crime.
We’ve spent so much time staring at perfect, curated grids online that seeing real, unedited human skin up close feels almost invasive.
Anyway, two seats down from the cake lady, there's a guy in a suit who is completely dead to the world. His head kept flopping onto the shoulder of this teenager next to him.
The kid is wearing these massive headphones and looks like a punk, but he’s deliberately freezing his shoulder stiff so the tired guy can keep sleeping. He hasn't moved an inch for three stops. It’s the weirdest, most silent piece of human empathy I've seen in a long time. Nobody is filming it for TikTok. It’s just happening in this smelly train car.
Unfiltered things in train car number 4:
The smell: A terrible mix of wet umbrellas, old leather, and someone eating very greasy fried chicken somewhere in the back.
The sound: The metallic clanking of the tracks underneath that makes your teeth vibrate, plus some low-quality rap music leaking out of cheap earbuds.
The pole: The metal bar everyone is grabbing. It’s freezing cold and slightly sticky. I hate touching it.
My stop is coming up. The lady with the cake got off at 14th street, pushing through the crowd like a fullback to protect her box. I’ll never know who gets to eat that cake.
I don't have a deep, philosophical lesson to end this with. I'm just glad my phone battery died. The real world is noisy and smells bad, but at least people are still weird when you actually bother to look at them.