The Ride In

Vignettes into each neighborhood morning blur by as the train motor whirrs. The clicking and bumping of the tracks count down in non equal increments to each station along the route. 233 clicks to the station west of mine. 327 clicks to the one beyond that. Tired faces enter as the doors open, finding a seat in less than a blink, settling into the 90s beige seats, claiming their spot until they reach their destination.  

As the doors open onto the third station from my stop, they frame the view beyond the interior of the train car, showcasing the brick wall at the Georgia State station with “don’t vote, REVOLT!” scribbled onto the tiles in black sharpie, the open metal doors forming a perfectly centered rectangle around it.

We pass under the Gulch, or the more corporatized, “Centennial Yards”, and under the viaducts, 40 feet below the ground, you can see graffiti of all kinds, even the Atlanta-famous “VAYNE” sprawled across the side walls in big block letters. The unknown icon has Spiderman level abilities to get into the hardest to reach places, lifts his can and marks his territory. He is the eyes of this city, leaving his tag in places unimagined and undiscovered, holding this place and this place holding him. He is a glimpse of something familiar, something raw, and simple. 

Looking down into the tracks, beyond the train and beyond the lines themselves, trash of all kinds is piled into a wet, coagulated mass. Within it you can make up some whole objects—chip bags, empty Newport cartons, and less disposable items that make you stop and wonder about the stories of their origins. Underwear, shoes, glasses. Could one really lose their underwear and not know? I tend to have my doubts, but in here, nothing seems impossible.

The escalator is broken. Origins of the breakdown are unknown, but it smells suspiciously of atomic-level piss. That smell is generally pretty ambient here though, so it could very well be on the wall next to me that assaults my olfactory system, and the escalator's demise could be something entirely inconspicuous. Maybe a pair of underwear was shoved into the motor, chewed up by the revolving stairs.

My destination building has people inside, nodding off over their breakfasts, the building security periodically coming by to knock on the table three times and remind them, for the fifth time that morning, they cannot sleep in there. Their tired, bloodshot eyes open and their heads give a slight nod, keeping their chins up until the security guard has passed on to the next table, buying them enough time to have some shut eye before he makes his way around again to tap three more times. 

I use my badge to get into the non-public part of the public area. I use my badge to then press the button with the number 16 pasted on sideways, and as long as I am not on elevator seven, which breaks, I then use my badge again to open the door onto the floor I work on. When I leave, no badges are needed, but elevator seven should still be largely avoided. Be ready to stop at every other floor on the way down, half the time the doors opening to an empty hall. I enter out of my bulletproof glass non-public badge-only area into the floor of the public, badgeless arena.

I pass the new restaurant called Momomo and wonder if it means something or if the state of branding and marketing has really taken a nosedive. The menu consists of food court sushi, which I thought had been collectively shunned by society, but this place proves me wrong. It generally has a customer or two, which is more than can be said for every shop down here. It’s one of the better looking restaurants on aesthetics alone, but something always stops me from actually trying it. The maneki-neko waves goodbye with his mischievous grin as I head towards the long ascent back into the station.

Back in the station, someone is yelling something incoherent. Someone else is playing a video out loud. The video involves two people fighting and yelling, sounds like the World Star or Bad Girls Club videos from my adolescence. A benevolent stranger tells the yelling man to shut the hell up. Asking someone to quiet their video is a death sentence, so it continues onward, the fighting never seeming to peak, it just keeps looping. Someone else is lifting up their shirt to air out their sweaty midriff standing completely in front of the only fan in the entire place. Their face looks like they’re experiencing a bliss only comparable to that of a lady in a yogurt commercial, so the rest of us collectively decide to let them have their moment with the fan while the sweat drops down our temples and backs. The stations aren’t designed for airflow, or cooling. It’s a bit unclear on whether these were really designed at all, or if a series of pieces just fell together to divinely create the confusing labyrinths of the central station. A riotous act of rejecting optimization and embracing chaos. Who knew the congruence of North and South with East and West could be so confusing.

The intern at my job fell and hit her head on the wet floor of one of the stations, and she fractured her skull. She had to be ambulanced out of the station, dazed, confused, concussed. Someone stopped and helped her. She hasn’t come back to work yet. Her boss said she was still in PT. I think about her curly bangs flown back, showing the pearly white of her usually-shaded forehead, the pupils of her eyes two different sizes. Apparently the person who helped her looked like an angel. Really, he was just a teenager in black hoodie.

The horn echoes down the tunnel. The rest of us finally experience a breeze as the train whooshes by and comes to a stop, doors loudly swinging open. A chicken bone and floss pick are in the seat by the door. Dental health is of utmost importance, according to the Tend dental ad behind the chicken bone chair. Everyone moves out of the single seats as the woman in the wheelchair comes in, giving her a space to sit. It’s hot and muggy inside the train too, not just the station. 

If you touch the standing pole and then touch your nose, forgetting sanitizer, better take a Vitamin C and Zinc tablet when you get home. My nose is itchy with the smell from someone's perfume. The jolting rickety tracks forced me to hold on to one of the standing poles. We don’t share seats—no open double seats means there are no seats at all. Don’t worry about the stickiness, the puddle on the ground, it’s nothing. Maybe it was just a honey covered hand or a spilled water bottle. Maybe.

The conductor mumbles something entirely incoherent over the speaker. Someone else is clearing their throat repeatedly. A baby is crying. The woman in the seat across from me gives me a tight lipped smile. She’s been my unnamed buddy on this ride. We stick together, mace in our pockets, ready to be one another’s witness if needed. Her water bottle has a sticker that says “Let’s be Better Humans” with small flowers along the bottom. Someone else drops their Purina bottle on the ground, and it rolls across the train floor as the speeds vary. It hits the side of my foot and then rolls back as the train speeds up and slows down. 

We pass through the tunnel and come out seeing the giant buildings, the gold topped dome, the standstill traffic below. The sky is clear and vast, the air outside crisp, the green of the trees so lovely I could cry, the sun shining into the windows and temporarily lighting up the train with such brilliance that all the scum and grime are suddenly gone, suddenly washed away and clean with the light of the day instead of the fluorescent lights within the car. The light shines on everyone’s faces, heads down into their phones, but in the light of the phones disappear in bright reflection, and for a moment everyone is holding a light themselves, everyone’s faces are blurred into the flash, and we all look the same, and the train is clean, and we are all better humans, and everything is beautiful and bright and light and we are all going somewhere different, but somewhere together.

The light abruptly stops as we enter back into a tunnel. The world goes back to its fluorescent tint, faces are downcast again. The roll and shake of the train along the uneven tracks rocks me back and forth. I can see the rolling water bottle coming towards my foot again, next to the bandaid on the ground. The name of my station lights up in red and dances across the digital screen. The doors open with a mechanical pound. There’s less of us the further we go along the east side stops, and the few of us who call this our home station all corral together onto the escalator, out of the broken fare gates, and back into the world in which we came from this very morning.