I was on the T with a friend and we were going to Chinatown.
“You’re gonna laugh at me,” I told my friend as the automated doors expelled us into the current of bustling bodies, “but that was one of the best moments of my life!”
“Huh?”
“It was like every person was a poem!”
There’d been a maybe sixty-two-year-old Chinese lady wearing those big black headphones that block out the world, and what was wonderful was that she appeared to be thinking, pondering the lyrics with a bemused hint of a smile.
Then there was a girl wearing a pine-tree-green hat that suited her, contrasting with her almost alabaster skin, her strong, indifferent features; I think her staring-out-the-window eyes were lake-blue.
People sitting down— with the standers like trees towering, swaying over them— had their eyelids blanketed over the dreaming orbs of their eyes. Except for one fidgeting woman who, pulling a manicured hand through her highlighted hair, seemed desperate to cry out in conversation, all the sitters sat like this in contented, embryonic silence.
Nearby a fine-featured shoulder-length-brown-haired girl stood, hand clasping a pole by the doors, head engaged in a green-blue covered book with yellow zigzags illuminating its border. Instantly recognizing it, my voice meant to rejoice, but in the same second I realized it wasn’t my reading I’d recognized, but my mother’s, and I turned away.