The only trains I knew as a kid were the freightliners that cut through my rural Minnesota town once or twice a day bearing wheat and soybeans and coal. Sometimes they measured over one hundred cars in length. I know because the train track lay between my father’s house and my mother’s, and my brother and I often found ourselves in the back seat of an idling car, lulled by the blinking red light that marked the crossing. We counted, delighting in the long ones. One hundred twenty cars, and we would be well-behaved for the rest of the day.

When I was in kindergarten, my mother took me to New York, and I fell in love with a very different kind of train. This one was louder, bolder, more cluttered. She may have also taken me to the Bronx Zoo or to F.A.O. Schwartz, but for all I remember, I spent the week riding the subway, drunk on unfamiliar faces, monotone announcements, and secondhand perfume.  Before we left, my mother snapped a picture of me waiting for a train, my mouth set in a solemn line, graffiti unfurling magnificently behind me.

My childhood experience notwithstanding, when I moved to New York a year and a half ago I was not an immediate natural. My family was of little help. Relatives from both sides warned me not to ride the subway at night, but then, they also advised me not to set foot in Central Park. And I got no advice, erroneous or otherwise, on proper decorum once on the train. Thus it was that, after dropping my things off at the apartment on West 104^th Street where I rented my first room, I boarded a downtown 1/9 train and quickly found myself in a bit of a quandary.

The train was fairly full, but I found a seat in the middle of a car. It seemed odd to be wedged between two strangers, to find my body touching the bodies of people I had never met, but this was my first day in the city, and I was enthusiastic. The proximity seemed almost glamorous.

“Nice day, huh?” the middle-aged man on my left said to me as the train pulled out of the station.

“Sure is,” I answered. It was August and so hot the asphalt had the consistency of taffy, but I had spent the past few months working at my father’s bar, perfecting the art of small talk, and I was eager to have a conversation about the weather in the big, impersonal city, even a conversation that wasn’t exactly based in reality. “It’s beautiful.”

“Yeah.” He went on about something else. It occurred to me that no one else was engaged in a similar conversation – in fact, most people seemed to be taking pains to avoid eye contact – but he seemed nice enough. The woman and children seated next to him seemed to be his wife and kids.

He trailed off. “You ever read the Bible?” he asked suddenly.

The conversation had taken a turn toward the personal, but I still felt at ease. “You know, I keep meaning to,” I said, as if it were a contemporary novel. “I hear it’s pretty good.”

He talked to me about Jesus, about God. He grew pushy – belligerent, even, for a follower of a religion that preaches love and understanding. But still I didn’t change cars. Of course, I didn’t know I could change cars.

Then, all of a sudden, he stopped and began surveying the car. He singled out the boy sitting across from us. He looked no older than fifteen – he was headed home from school, probably – and he was wearing black jeans with a faint white spot on one thigh. “Do you think he spilled milk on his leg or do you think he gizzed all over himself?”

The boy fought back tears. The people on the car shot the man disgusted looks. Because I was the one foolish enough to let him engage me in conversation, I felt responsible. I turned my head and ignored him all the way to 14^th Street, reproaching myself for my stupidity.

Don’t talk to anyone ever became my subway-riding mantra for the next few months. If a man apologized for stepping on my foot, I scowled. If tourists asked me for directions to Chinatown, I grew suspicious. Of course, I wasn’t in any position to give directions, but instead of smiling and saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t know,” I cast my eyes downward and shook my head. After my Metrocard was swiped out of the back pocket of my jeans one day, I grew equally protective of my body. My subway stance came to resemble that of a professional quarterback – legs wide apart, arms at fierce angles.

What I didn’t realize was that a subway train could foster as much community as my father’s bar. I just didn’t know how to recognize it. While riders typically retreat into themselves, they are often drawn together in unexpected ways. Sometimes it takes something offensive, like the man I met on the 1/9, to inspire a collective identity in them. Other times a technical problem or a service outage does the trick. Nothing is more universally frustrating than hearing a goofy male voice come over the loudspeaker and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for the unavoidable delay.” At other moments it’s a skillful performance – the irresistible mariachi band that works the 4/5/6, or the silent magician who actually pulls a live rabbit out of his hat, or the man who hawks tape measures with naughty allusions. (I have seen him four times in the past two weeks on four different trains, and the routine is always the same: “For those gentlemen who don’t know where they stand – and you know what I mean – now, in the privacy of your home, without your old lady knowing anything about it, you can see how you measure up.”)

Sometimes it is a matter of catching the train at the right time of day. Contrary to Midwestern intuition, for example, the subway can become friendlier late at night. It helps that people are not pressed up against each other, fighting for space, and that many riders spend the hours leading up to their rides home downing drinks. One night last summer, I took a seat at the end of an uptown 2/3 car and found myself in the midst of enthusiastic bilingual exchange. A man with a weathered, leathery face was relaying song lyrics to the eager smooth-skinned guy sitting across from him. The old man did not speak English, and the young one did not speak Spanish, but that did not deter either from communicating. As the old man sang, a smiling fellow sitting a few feet away from him translated. The smiling guy’s date looked on, laughing heartily.  Subway nights are filled with moments like that one: small, spontaneous collisions of lonely urban souls.

Once in a while, those encounters lead to something more lasting. Last September I rode the 6 train home from a party at around 2 a.m. on a Saturday night. The conditions were right for such a meeting, but the ride was entirely uneventful. I couldn’t keep my eyes on my novel, and I nearly fell asleep. Then, as I passed through the turnstile at 116^th Street, I spotted a flash of plaid shirt, a bolt of jeans, a bit of black hair escaping from beneath a worn baseball cap – a young guy disappearing up the stairs. I made my way out of the station and began the long walk home. I rounded the corner, and there he was again, mysterious, faceless, ahead of me. He stopped for a red light, and suddenly I was standing next to him. He stared at me, and I stared back. He was beautiful.

“Hi,” I said. He laughed.

It would have made a better story if I had said “Nice day, huh?” But that was what I said – “hi” – and with that, the subway became my home, my community, my small-town bar. If you can approach a stranger in a bar simply because you both happen to be in the same bar, why not do the same in the subway?

“You met him where?” my mother, my friends, my roommate, and just about everyone else I know asked.

We’ve been dating ever since.

On Halloween night, we boarded a Manhattan-bound L train in Brooklyn and found the entire car deep in song. A man resting against the far door led everyone in “Lean on Me.” Friends dressed like zombies swayed with their arms around each other. Nurses kissed doctors, and devils hugged angels. People in puffy colored wigs clapped their hands. We looked at each other and smiled broadly.

Ah, the subway -- so vast and so intimate, so volatile and so predictable, and always so full of possibility.

Mara Hvistendahl is a writer living in Manhattan. She has been published in The Arizona Republic, The Philadelphia Independent, and Volume NYC. She likes to ride the subway with her beau, rearrange the furniture in her apartment, and run in the rain.