This Is Just a Nightmare
I notice the F is going the way of the G when we hit Hoyt instead of Jay St but don’t react quickly enough to get off. I haven’t been listening to the announcements, even though the sign over our heads says I should do just that in bright red lights.
I get off at Clinton-Washington instead of Fulton because I have decided I’m not in that much of a hurry and prefer to float through the train and subway stations like they are the belly of a whale that’s swallowed me. I’ll make my way out eventually.
I walk up the stairs and out and swipe my card again and then turn and walk down, wait a minute for the G going in the other direction, get on it, get off it two stops later, get on the A.
I’ve been on the train a lot over the last week, and at weird times of day, because I have family, both chosen and biological, visiting from out of town, and what I have chosen to do is organize my days around meeting them in Manhattan so that at least I’m in control of my own schedule. But of course, with the train, we’re never really in control, and when I step onto the Brooklyn-bound G platform at Clinton-Washington I am seized with an enormous desire to cry. I see a short woman with a blonde ponytail and small, rectangular glasses engrossed by her phone and imagine what it would be like to stand next to her and weep. By the time I’m done conjuring the image the desire has passed.
Once I get on either the 4 or the 5 or the 6 going uptown I figure I’m here for a while, and I look for the little yellow blinking dot on the overhead panel that tells me where the train is only to receive a welcome if slightly annoying reminder that surprises can be good as often as they are bad: I’m on the express. I was ready to embrace the funk — nothing went right; I’m an hour late; there’s a couple on this train fighting so loudly everyone is looking — and now I have to welcome a sliver of light. I’m only twenty minutes late in the end.
The reason I’m late, the reason I don’t hear the announcement that the train is going a different way than it should be, and the reason I don’t care, is that I’ve been listening to Radiohead’s “4 Minute Warning” on repeat. Thom Yorke is singing “this is just a nightmare / soon I’m gonna wake up,” a fucked-up lullaby, scooping me from platform to train to seat to platform. I am floating; I am disembodied; I have become a fine silvery mist; I am not in control; the train is going in only one direction, and if I don’t like it, all I can do is get off.