The subway is full of yarmulkes and turbans, baggy jeans and three piece suits, hospital scrubs and beach coverups. It’s full of leotards and fishnets, sweater vests and ripped jeans, crocs and stilettos. The subway is full of black and white and brown and every color in between, each car carrying a multitude of languages and incomes and occupations and life stories.
It carries the homeless man who maneuvers through the train, looking for a few extra cents or some leftover food. It carries the street performer, holding his speaker and dancing boldly for the rest of the riders. It carries the exhausted nurse, drinking Pepsi as she dreads the overtime shift she’s heading towards that will prevent her from picking her sons up from school.
It carries the high school boy who stands in the corner with his headphones blasting, trying not to think about the new man who has been living in his mother’s bedroom for the past month. And it carries the ambitious intern with her bright red lanyard and double espresso, anxiously checking her Apple Watch at each stop, terrified of showing up late and disappointing her boss.
The subway is filled with thousands of people and thousands of stories that we’ll never know. That man in the grungy coveralls? He’s a millionaire. That millionaire reading the Financial Times? He numbs his loneliness each night with a bottle of scotch. That old woman loudly complaining about the construction delays? Her husband just filed for divorce. The young girl fidgeting with her designer skirt? She’s trying to figure out a way to skip tennis practice and avoid the new coach that keeps hitting on her.
Each person gets on and off, moving to the rhythm of an individual life, going to work or school or anywhere, just going. The subway doesn’t care who you are, what you do or where you’re going, it takes you there. On the subway, you’re just one in a million. Your race, your net worth, your occupation, your gender, none of those things give you a leg up. Because the subway doesn’t care. It continues to stop and go and break down and speed up. It opens its doors and the crowds stream in, unconcerned with who’s on the train, just concerned with where it’s going.
At rush hour, old Hispanic women are pressed up against young black men and a Hindu teenager stands up so a gay couple can sit down with their kids. We all smell and we all complain and we all stand there with our headphones in pretending not to sweat on each other. If you’re young and sprightly you stand up so someone else can sit down and that’s about the only rule.
The subway’s not perfect. It breaks down and it's dirty and sometimes a few stops are closed. It’s harder to get on if you don’t have the $2.75 fare or if you’re in a wheelchair. There are still some people at a disadvantage. But overall, it unites humanity in a unique and purposeful way: we all get on when we need to and we all get off when we need to and while we ride, we’re united in our pursuit of our destination and we all ignore each other equally. And there’s something kind of beautiful about that.