I sit leisurely with my right boot neatly crossed over its’
partner, the pair resting atop the seat opposite to mine. It is the 7:52
evening train to Southeast from Grand Central. Thirty-one minutes ago, these
same pads were flying at (self-proclaimed) breakneck speeds from the 6 Uptown
subway through peak-hour foot traffic to Track 29, where they would come to a
blatant halt at the verbal proclamation, “FUCK!” This obscenity screeched at an
admittedly un-lady-like volume, perhaps compensating for the temporary deafness
caused by One Headlight blasting
through my headphones. It was 7:21:34, and the 7:21 train slowly, but damned
hell surely was already in motion, leaving me to rot on the platform wallowing
in the mortification of the totally obnoxious F-bomb I had just dropped in
front of two wide-eyed elderly women and a MTA employee.
For the next thirty-one minutes, I would sit in the last car
of the next departing train, sighing heavily out of frustration and shamelessly
people watching.
Do you ever see someone creeping on you, and when you look
at him or her, they don’t look away or pretend that didn’t just happen?
They just stare straight through your flesh, into the depths of your soul with zero
remorse. Then to amplify the awkward, the rest of the time spent in their
presence you uncontrollably indulge in a tug-of-war of staring contests with
them?
In this scene here, I was the creep. And while they all
boarded at different times, clad in a prism of jeans to dresses to suits, they
all had the same thing in common.
Washed out complexion. Dreary-eyed. Seemingly absent-minded.
Most mouths lazed into position of awe, some near-foaming. No personal connections or interactions took place between or
amongst any of them.
I was sitting on a train of Zombies.
“Is that what I want to look like, five, fifteen, fifty
years down the road?” I asked my still-creepily entranced self. By the way, for
sake of self-dignity, I will now blame such rude fixation on some Zombie spell
they must have cast on me.
They all seem so miserable. Most of them had probably just
sat in an office for the previous eight hours staring at a lucid screen
thinking about all of the things they would rather be doing. This, of course,
is a generalization, as well as a presumption. But seriously, judging by every
drab countenance I held in eyesight… these were not the faces of self-fulfilled
happy people.
As if staring at machines, crunching numbers and sending e-mails
all day wasn’t draining enough, here they sit, staring blankly into their
computers. Their smartphones. Their tablets. Crunching numbers. Checking
e-mails. Responding to e-mails.
Honestly, the oversized Italian gentleman saturated in Acqua di Gioia playing Candy Crush seemed the most human.
I don’t even feel bad for them. At this point, they are all
sick masochistic monsters.
And as if one phone wasn’t enough, some have TWO.
One for business, one for pleasure?
Gross.
...I suppose when I start to write one-lined adjectives of my
repulsion, I should stop writing before this turns into a rant.
I will end in saying that realistically speaking, I will
float along side of you for now, Society,
just to make ends meet. However, I hope to never sacrifice my own sane content human soul to satisfy the opinions of those flesh-hungry Zombies.
