There's an art to the 6 train at rush hour and I am still, two years in, only a middling student.
Wednesday I left the office near Union Square and made the mistake of heading uptown at 6:15. The platform was a wall of people. The 6 train at rush hour does not care about your plans, your bad day, or your delicate little design-girl dreams.
The doors opened and we poured in like rice into a too-small pot. I ended up pressed between a man reading an actual paperback and a woman who smelled incredible, like figs and money.
Here's what nobody back home understands about the 6 train at rush hour. It should feel awful. And it does, physically. But there's also this strange peace in it.
Because nobody is looking at you. Nobody cares. In Ahmedabad everyone knew whose daughter I was, which society I lived in, how I should sit. Here I'm a body in a crowd of bodies, gloriously anonymous.
The art of disappearing is underrated. On the 6 train at rush hour I am no one. And no one is the most freeing thing to be when you've spent your whole life being someone's expectation.
We lurched between 23rd and 28th. The paperback man and I did the subway apology dance when we bumped. The fig woman got off at 33rd and the whole car exhaled an inch of space.
Then a tiny thing happened. An older woman got on with too many bags and three separate people stood up without a word. Wordless New York grace. It happens more than people admit.
She sat, sighed, and smiled at nobody in particular. I smiled too, at my own reflection in the dark window, this girl from Gujarat in a sea of strangers, perfectly invisible and completely fine with it.
The 6 train at rush hour is not glamorous. But some days disappearing is exactly the rest you need.
Be no one for a stop or two. It's cheaper than therapy.
Love,