I don't always drive into tornadoes but when I do 40 is not enough

When its shell breaks, the egg slides, lead by the yolk, to settle in the low point of the pan. The albumen spreads. As the heat takes to the pan, the albumen finds its edge and begins to cloud white. 

There's a man I see on the train infrequently.  When I do see him, I have trouble looking away from him. His forehead bulges forward. He wears thick glasses.  I can't tell if he can see me. His eyes don't appear in the glass of his lenses. I have yet to spot his eyes. Behind his glasses his skin is dark, as if bruised. 

Beside me there's a sleeping woman. Her mouth is open. The Gucci insignia is set into the periwinkle nail of her ring finger. Versace glasses. Braids. Skirt suit.

People on my car keep their eyes closed. Some bear pillow marks on their cheeks. When a young man walks into the middle of the car and complains that he looks around the ring fingers of the people of New York and  no longer sees any engagement rings, the people on my car stir.  He's moved into their room. He's speaking in a fluid non sequitur that grows in its anger. I've heard him before talk about the billions of dollars he has, how Jay-Z speaks directly to him. His sneakers are white, dirty and near collapse at the heel.  His voice is broad enough to allow no one to feel it directly but it becomes so loud it's impossible to ignore. The nuisance of an alarm clock.  The faces wrinkle as they cannot slap it back to snooze. 

I have pink eye. 

I woke up with my right eye sealed shut. I strained to open my eyelid. The best I could do was open it a quarter of the way and the room looked soft, glaucous until I made my way to the sink and massaged my eye open, cleaned it then admired the swollen lid in the mirror- what a shifty look it gave me having one eye more open than the other.

Of the few who appear awake, a middle aged black woman in a t-shirt that reads "I don't always drive into tornadoes but when I do 40 is not enough" is writing in an oversized composition book. She has it in her lap and appears to be using it for landscapes. I remember not to check her face after I read her shirt. I look away without looking up, without measuring the pieces of her I can see.

Subway Withdrawals

I no longer have to take the subway to work.  I can walk.  I can take the bus.  I can ride my bike. Or I can take a bus to the subway.  I now have an embarrassment of options. 

The walk is normally gorgeous.  Populated in the mornings by canines and their caretakers, Central Park takes me in.  The change in the seasons refreshes, but I switch up my path in order to keep it fresh, to try to lose the familiarity (which is impossible without allowing years to pass). A creature trying to destroy all habits, like a squirrel saving cigarette butts, is unnatural so more often than not I default down the same wide walks, hearing every morning that one dog who sounds like an alarm (Arooo, arooo, arooo-- in perfectly timed intervals).   

In the rain, I take the bus to the subway.  The populous bus, the fed accordion bending around wide turns. Quite. Out the windows: the city.  A more or less polite experience.  People seem far less likely to ____ you on the bus.  Fleeting, accessible bus.  

Just a few months away from the subway and I already feel like a foreigner.  Do I stand here or there? Underground the pressures build. Outside the windows: tunnels, darkness.  Inside the car someone let leak the hostility that comes with being trapped among strangers.  The subway is a case study in claustrophobia, paranoia, fear of the dark and agoraphobia all at once.  A body is weighed on the subway, measured and ignored all at once.  Swipe the Metrocard and submit. Or act out. People seem much more likely to _____ you on the subway.

That conditioning lies dormant.  The jostle, hustle and anxiety of it all.  The publicity of strap-hanging and anger management. Here we go, leg to leg with the rain-wet masses.  The unpleasantness creates its own range of desires, it's own moral compass.  Revisiting the subway makes me realize I miss it, like a retired cop misses his spot on the bomb squad.  That little touch of morning adrenalin as the cars clatter and screech.  People can grow accustomed to all kinds of unsavory things.  I miss the subway. 

The First Car

The first car on the subway, or the car closest to the stairs, is populated by the lazy, the desperate, the infirmed, the work-worn and the broken.  Do not seek a seat in the first car if you are able-bodied, humane or energetic. Their clothes are all lined with lead and their doomed shuffle is contagious.  

Move down two or three cars past the clot of human cholesterol crowding the bottom of the stairs, but don't sit in the middle car. The middle car is reserved for paranoids and obsessives who need to be near the train conductor just in case. 

Similarly if you watch the train arrive and every car is jam-packed except for one, do not go on that empty car.  It is most likely home to a smell so full and noxious that it will take up permanent residence in your olfactory bulb, reset your index of smells with its extremity and leave you incapable of sensing fresh baked muffins.  If it is the dead of summer that will be the car with no AC-- acceptable for some.  

Even still-- once you make it onto a car, past the last little flecks of human cholesterol who cling to their spots by the door as if it were the gate to heaven, there is no guarantee that you will not be sitting next to a woman busily filing her nails into a fine dust for everyone in her proximity to inhale or some obnoxious cling-on singing a song about how he makes that pussy wet or a crackhead washing her pipe-burnt hands with gin or a genuine crotch-o-dile (thanks, KW, for the term) masturbating, flashing or otherwise rubbing sexually in public or be assailed by aggressive pan-handlers.  

Or you may get a treat: Mariachi band, pre-teen subway back flip pseudo-dance squad (the ones who do the Spiderman work out "Girls, if your boyfriend can't do this leave him!").  One great night the man who raps to his Casio keyboard  (formerly partnered with a women who would drum a bucket for him-- "It ain't no joke, for real I'm broke.") got a dollar from just about every person on the train.  Everyone independently reaching into their pocket to give this guy some cash-- he was ecstatic, Jimmy Stewart at the end of It's a Wonderful Life ecstatic, he couldn't believe more and more people kept giving.  He was ready to walk off the train and someone else would hold out a buck.  It was maybe the best moment I've ever had on the subway, the code of silence still in tact, people grinned sensing at least that locks could open every few years for people to show a common kindness.