First, you walk to the Woodside station in Queens for the 7 train. At the entrance to the escalator there’s usually some Third-World person handing out the Metro or AMNY papers. You don’t deal in distraction, and he or she takes one look at your face and reaches behind you to hand it to the next person. Riding up the escalator, you chastise yourself for thinking, ‘Third-World person’. Then you find yourself staring at the squeaky hair and jug handle ears of the guy in front of you. How can anyone look so hopeful from the back? The ride up is long and slow. There’s an electric sign up above that reads, ‘Hop On & Off the Escalator’. This makes you picture someone who’s just come to New York, stuck at the bottom because they take the sign literally, getting more and more frustrated. You think it would be a good opening shot for a movie you will do one day about how lonely the city can be for people who just get here. It would be a wide shot.

The first leg of the trip is not so bad. You take the 7 two stops to Roosevelt Ave. This would be going away from Manhattan, the wrong way. Since this train is above ground, you can see the silvery tips of the city slipping even farther from you. The train’s nearly empty though, so at least you get a seat.  

Then you take the stairs down and then the stairs down and then the stairs down to the E,F,V and R trains to Manhattan. It’s Monday and everybody’s moving slow, all herded together like a scene out of Schindler’s List, except these people look a little sadder. You chastise yourself for thinking anything could be sadder than Schindler’s List.

Today, you see a group of firemen coming from the very platform you are headed to. They trudge up the steps and have sooty faces. A few of them carry axes. You see people ahead of you slow their step, exchange looks. In the end, everyone keeps walking. One day you’re going to write a book where the theme is the dead-eyed passivity of modern man in these terroristic times. It’s going to be science fiction-the people are going to be wolves, the terrorists, sheep.  The main terrorist is going to be a lamb called Sinbaaad.

The express takes ten minutes but it’s only two stops. This train goes very fast but there are never any seats and if there are, some shark-like people who were already standing inside get them first. This is like being promoted from within, which is like nepotism, which is not fair.

There’s nothing to look at now. You’re on your feet, and you can’t read and hang on at the same time. Nothing to see underground, though shortly after you came to New York, you used to look for gangs of Mole People frolicking in the shadows.

There are two types on a crowded train: the glarers and the look-awayers. The first type, when they catch you looking at them (because, what are you supposed to look at, your shoes?) glare at you, like you just killed their mother or something. You try to convey with a haughty smirk, ‘Yeah, that’s right. I did kill your mother. Tell her thanks for the Metrocard.’ The look-awayers are even worse. When you feel someone looking at you and then you look at them and they turn away, it’s like something was supposed to happen and they didn’t give it a chance. Like they took something from you. It makes you want to stare at that person until they look again, so you can turn away first this time, take it back. You think of the Indians, how they used to think a photograph would steal their soul. Whoops, Native Americans.

As the train begins to slow for its first stop, you start scanning. Caddy corner and across, you spot a fat woman making ‘this is my stop’ movements. She’s folding her paper and cramming it into her tote bag, trying to stuff the last of her orange into her mouth. You see fat people on the train eating fruit a lot. You see skinny people eating hot dogs and ice cream bars and McDonald’s, but fat people always seem to be spread out over several seats, picking mango string out their teeth, looking around to see what they can do with their banana peel. Fruit. You never go near it.

What you do is start making your way towards her. As the train pulls into the station, you pretend that you too are getting ready to get off. You nudge past a guy with closed eyes and an Ipod and two young girls who are wearing way too much black eyeliner and suck their teeth as you pass. They’ll probably be pregnant before the end of the school year. Then they won’t be so quick to wear those tummy tops. Most of the people are taller than you and give way like old doors.

When the train has stopped, the fat woman (you’re not supposed to say fat, you’re supposed to say…what are you supposed to say?) has grabbed her bag, her other hand on the pole in front of her. She is looking behind her at the sea of torsos the windows now reveal. There is a man hanging over the woman, looking out the window too. He has a bushy, policeman type of moustache and it’s kind of turned up like he’s thinking, ‘Lookit dose guys, thinkin’ dere gonna get my seat…” You position yourself next to the man, your body turned at a 45-degree angle. The air around the woman smells nice and citrusy.  “Mission Impossible” music is playing in your head.

When the door opens, people start shuffling out, eyes downcast, only to raise them threateningly to the people on the platform who may have forgotten the ‘Let the Passengers Off First’ rule. The Orange Eater’s grip tightens on the pole by her arm and she hefts herself up with a ‘Hoowah!’ like someone from a 70’s funk band. The minute she has taken one step from the seat, you turn another 45 degrees and sit down, hitting the woman’s tote bag with your knee. She turns and frowns at you, like she thought once she got up, the seat was going to be turned into a shrine. People lighting candles and leaving orange peels beneath her picture.  You glance up with just your eyeballs to the moustache man’s chin. It’s pointed right in your direction. You know he’s glaring at you so you don’t look any higher. On second thought, you hate someone glaring more than someone looking away. Only thing worse than having your soul stolen is having it bitch-slapped. You assume a complacent, relaxed-lipped look on your face, like you could hum if you wanted to. Like you don’t give a fuck. You went to acting school with this girl named Katya, who’d grown up with a cat who would jump up on the table at dinner parties and eat off the guests’ plates. “Poufy,” she’d shake her head in awe, “didn’t give a fuck.”

 Just before your stop, you get up early and make eye contact with Moustache Man. It’s only right to give him advance seating. But he turns away, staring hard at the Poetry in Motion poster overhead, like he’s never wanted to sit down in his entire life, like he’s got fatal hemorrhoids or no kneecaps, so what the hell do you know?  As you get off, you turn in time to see the guy with the iPod bop over and get the seat before anybody even notices it’s free. His eyes are half-closed, like he’s walking in his sleep.

Now comes the long walk to transfer once again.  It wouldn’t be so bad if you were coming from the G, to transfer to the trains into Manhattan—there’s a horizontal escalator, like the ones they have in airports. But if you’re transferring to the G, it means you’re going from Queens to Brooklyn, not even stopping for one millisecond in Manhattan, which is the reason everyone comes to New York, which makes you a loser. The people on the going-to-Manhattan escalator look shinier and better dressed than the ones on the 718-all-day side. Metro vs. Urban. The majority of the first group are white, while with the exception of one old couple, none of you guys are. You walk and walk as the Manhattan-bounds glide by.

“Something’s wrong,” you thought, the first time you reached the station for the G. Here, there was no rumble of trains or clap of hurrying feet. No musicians jamming or bums singing their sad song. There is just a vast, dark space you found yourself hurrying across, looking all about you like some girl in a B horror flick. You’d auditioned for a few of those when you first got here. You’d read okay. You could certainly look scared. But the important part, you always got wrong. “Sweetheart,” the cigar chomping man or woman behind the desk would say, “ya gotta scream like ya mean it.”

When you get down the stairs, there are more people. Some stare fixedly in the direction from which the train will arrive, since as everyone knows, that makes it come faster. Others look straight down at the tracks, as though when the train comes, they would like to hurl themselves onto them, were it not for the ochre colored puddles gathered therein.

That’s a nice word. Say it a couple of times: therein, therein. One day you’ll write a poem that will begin with the word, ‘Therein’. It will also have the words ‘mist’, ‘paradigm’, and ‘lo’.

Once, Katya wanted to go to a party at this house on the G-line. You were living in Soho at the time, thanks to your boyfriends, Visa and Mastercard. “Are you kidding?” you’d scoffed. “What kind of people are they? How good could this party be? I wouldn’t be caught dead on a train that didn’t go into Manhattan…” The two of you ended up catching Happy Hour at Gonzalez y Gonzales in the Village on Broadway. As luck would have it, they were giving away free salsa lessons that night. After four mojitos, you ended up making out with the instructor, Lupe, while Katya yakked into a bowl of chips. Then the three of you stumbled arm in arm down Houston St. singing, ‘Que Bonita Bandera!’ at the top of your lungs.

She was fun, Katya. Where did she go? What happens to people?

When at long last the G arrives, it moves as though it has not wheels, but feet. It shuffles and sighs like a man on his way to the john after a big dinner, sports section tucked under his arm. As opposed to the average subway train, which is at least 8 cars long, the G-spot has only four. This means, that as the conductor’s pulling into the station, they have to stick their head out the window to gauge approximately where everyone is standing. Then they stop the train 30 feet away.

Everybody starts to run: coffee spilling, high heels wobbling, pregnant stomachs bouncing. “This is the only workout I get all day.” You hear a man joke to his friend.

“It’s worth it, running for the G.”  No it’s not. Why do we lie to ourselves? This isn’t worth…

“Shit!” A toothless woman dressed in men’s work overalls yells as the train pulls off. She is shaking and spanking her CD walkman. “This thing always wanna act up on the train, you know what I’m saying?” She looks up as she says this, her head turning to address each person, like they teach you to do in public speaking class. Everyone is looking anywhere else. The games on their cell phones or the newspaper turned to the page with sudoku, (and what the hell is that anyway?) The woman is seated right across from you, so you fix your eyes above her head, to the advertisements for schools for Nurse’s aides and legal aides and all manner of assistants. Colleges where double majoring means you can study for your GED at the same time. You wonder if the alumni from any of these schools ever see these signs as they ride to work. You wonder if they think, ‘Train for an exciting career in three weeks my ass.’

When you’re poor, not only can you think of nothing but money, it seems you can’t learn anything but how to make it. The people who go to these schools are never going to worry that they can’t understand Kant, or argue that Freud was a fraud or feel nude reading Neruda.

Of course, you never went to college. You came to the city to be an actress, spent your twenties chasing fame and glory. Who knew fame and glory could run so fast?

You did go to Princeton. Once. Took the train down and wandered around campus-all stone and archways and rolling green. You had your backpack on and no one took any notice as you headed for the lawn, collapsing in a sunbeam with finds from a second-hand bookshop. You awoke from a nap to a landscape dotted with tuxedos. Clusters of boys strode across campus bearing corsages. There must have been a dance, a formal. The girls wore long dresses, moved in the late afternoon light like petal-hued ghosts. As you got up to leave, you saw one girl pause in the shadows of a church. She had been walking with some friends when you saw her stop, her hand poised over her chest. She watched the other girls hurry across the lawn. It was as though she’d just realized what a good life she had, that it was made up of moments, and she’d wanted to remember this one.

“Anybody got some damn batteries?” Overalls, still fretting over her CD player, now inquires. “Where’d those motherfuckers go used to walk through the cars selling batteries? Nowadays, all you get is these little gangsters selling peanut M&M’s.”

 A titter. Out of the corner of your eye, you see a woman smile into her lap. She’s got the right idea. Your lap is certainly a better place to look than the stations on this line. Most of them are dark, benchless. The walls look like they were the final stop for a suicide bomber with diarrhea.

Suddenly, Overalls hops up, lifts the CD player over her head, and sends it crashing down to the ground. “I’m not playin’ with you!’ She yells. The woman next to you laughs openly. Everyone else watches beneath hooded, indignant stares. People require such silence on a morning train. Tough love must not have been working, for the crazy woman begins stomping up and down the aisle, hurling the CD player in front of her. The woman next to you has a slow, rolling laugh, like “Hehh-hehh-ehh.” She sounds like she’ll tell this story to her friends at work, but not in a mean way.

“Metropolitan!” Half the people in the car get up and start heading for the doors. At this stop there’s a transfer to the L. Two stops after that, they’ll be in Manhattan. Even the crazy woman starts to gather her shopping bags, pointedly ignoring the walkman lying on the ground, as though to frighten it. At the last moment, she bends and scoops it up. “Don’t know why I bother...” she mutters.

“I wonder if that thing ever worked in the first place.” You say this to your watch, but when the woman next to you chuckles, you smile too and look at her.

"I always think that if I was rich,” the woman says, “I would like to have a subway car all to myself.”

"Wouldn’t you rather have a limo?”

“Bah!” the woman snorts cheerfully, as though she’d spent the weekend test-driving some. “With traffic in this city, it’d take me two hours to get to work.”

“But if you were rich, you wouldn’t need to go to work,” you point out.

The woman gets up. She’s going to hit me, you think, but instead, she just shrugs. She is wearing one of those business suits with the padding in the shoulders. “If I didn’t work, what would I do all day?” She wishes you a good one and gets off at the next stop.

You know what you would do. You wouldn’t have to go to this temp job, and keep getting lost on the way back from the bathroom. Or open up the staff refrigerator and see all those Tupperware containers lined up like coffins. Or hurry over when someone asks, "Hey! Where’s the temp?" "Exactly how many words a minute can you type?” “We use the coffee filters twice here.” “There’s the boss. Look busy when he comes by.” “What are you, an actress? A student?”

No, nothing like that.  You just couldn’t scream like you meant it.

Naturi Thomas the published author of a children's book. Her travel writing and fiction appears in the e-zines Ukula and the upcoming Involutions. She is a student in the writing program at New School University.