By Anne Ray

In a faraway life, a normal morning for me began with a journey to an office. A walk down a noisy avenue in Brooklyn, past a string of bodegas and tire shops and the long line forming outside the Medicaid office, down into the subway along with a parade of others on their own journeys. By the time I arrived on the N train platform the crowd would be six deep. I saw the same faces: The couple with their baby on their way to daycare, he with corn-blonde hair slicked back like a seal. When it was time to board the process was surprisingly ordered, even with the crowd and all the objects they carried: stroller, folded massage table, rolling garment bag, guitar case, lunch in a plastic bag. After the collective shuffle to find space, the task was to stand still, and we all engaged in something. Reading, neck bent toward phone, or just listening, watching, trying to sleep. There was, more often than not, an empty coffee cup on the floor, and we all danced around it as it rolled and dripped.

The train would depart and go over the Manhattan bridge. No matter how dour I felt, no matter how late I was, every time the sun was out, thwipping between trestles, right over my shoulder, it seemed, lighting the corners of Chinatown until the train dropped underground, I felt a gentle sense of possibility. When I got out at Union Square, one of the most humming transfer points in the city, if I was lucky, the man with a crooked eye would be saying, Morning, AM News, morning, AM News, and it would sound like a bird, and the greenmarket would already be up and filled with flowers.

I think of it now, now that the notion of going to work is irrevocably changed, and, even still, I sometimes go to sleep envisioning this day as tomorrow. Sometimes I think that when I am 80, I’ll probably still imagine tomorrow this way. I’ll get a coffee when I get off the subway. I’ll walk with all the other kids to their jobs in publishing or graphic design or whatever. Maybe we’ll have stayed up too late the night before, we’ll have skipped breakfast, maybe we’ll have listened to the radio while trying to rush out. But we’ll make it to work eventually and will bitch at our desks. About how long it took to get here. About that stupid email. About nothing. About everything.

I spent my time in transit reading. A magazine could be folded into a small shape, for when I needed to twist to reach a pole to steady myself, trying not to swat anyone. But more often than not I would carry a doorstop hardback novel. Sinking into a book served as the needed distraction from the crowded, exasperating subway. Because I couldn’t risk getting stuck—and we all often got stuck, from signal problems, sick passengers, track fires—with nothing to read, couldn’t risk a dead cell phone battery or no signal. But more than that, the time began to contain a sweetness, even in maximum rush hour, where there was nothing to do but read. A friend who, for a time, commuted nearly the entire length of the A train every day told me how she misses it. All the books I read, she said.

When I was commuting everyone around me filled the time, either to extend work—furiously typing emails on phones, reading documents, doing homework—or to begin leisure—Candy Crush, a nap, the crossword, or, like me, a book. Whatever it was, it was done mostly alone. Often, I would try to read the book, and as the train rattled below me, I would realize that I’d drifted from the page into thought, one hand cradling the heavy book, the other holding the subway pole. I was probably thinking of the day, the evening ahead. Sometimes I was worried, or daydreaming, or at loose ends. Many times, I saw my fellow passengers no longer looking at their phones or books or documents. Just, looking.

Once, years ago, during a fleeting interest in photography, I took my new camera onto the subway, and snapped other riders doing the same, frozen in the still frame. Looking at these photographs now, I see glimpses of people whose faces mirrored my own internal state. In them I see that we—this stranger and I—shared a feeling, and that it was normal. No matter how anxious that feeling was, we were two strangers, alive, together.

I was young when I had this commute. I’m only a little older, but I feel much more, now that my commute has shrunk from bed to table. Now that the endless clock of the pandemic has changed the way days, hours, lives slip by. March 10, 2020 was the day I showed up at work after being away on time off. Two days later, they sent us home to work remotely, and I haven’t been back since. How much time seemed to materialize, now that going to work was deleted. And how much time we’d wasted, in retrospect, in the dull, repetitive grind between work and home.

But that commute generated a transitory space and time, one so deeply embedded in the dailyness of living that I had ceased to notice it until its disappearance. A space when we are not at our jobs and not at our homes, when we are busily living our lives in a shared subway car, a shared commuter rail. In between lay a time and space bounded by a beginning and end point. Work and home. An inflexible structure, yet, for me, that daily unstructured time, where the only purpose was to get from work to home, generated a private space of thought. Now, work is barely a room away. That space and time, doesn’t appear regularly twice a day. Even though while riding the N train I felt at times like a dull office drone, irritated, hassled, the woman in the gray flannel suit—now I sit with my laptop squealing with emails and Slack messages, and feel a private nostalgia for reading a book while the wheels clack beneath me, for the thought that soon, I’ll have left it behind, and I’ll be home.

One of the regulars on my commute was a woman in navy scrubs, an ID hanging from a lanyard around her neck. She always carried a heavy backpack, from which she’d remove a plastic container, a spoon, a tiny carton of milk, and would proceed to eat a bowl of cereal. The forethought, the feat of balance, the organization, made her seem, to me, superhuman. For many long, long months, she must have been one of the many who had to keep commuting. Perhaps people like me—privileged enough to have a job that didn’t disappear, one with the specific privilege of being able to be done anywhere with internet–staying off the subway meant more room for her. By showing up for work every day she put herself at daily risk. At least with less of us there, she could eat Raisin Bran in peace.

I miss seeing her. I miss the opportunity to offer my seat. It feels strange to have nostalgia for the between time, when the particulars contained so much annoyance. I don’t miss the time someone took a piss on the platform, or the times people have hurled pointless insults at others. But I miss the spontaneous conversation with a stranger over a book. Should I read it? she asked me. I miss seeing a man in an expensive suit commuting on the same train as a man coated from knees to boots in drywall spatter. I miss sneaking a glance at what book someone is reading; I miss someone sneaking a glance at what book I am reading. Being thrust into the world, with all its mess and joy and delays and sunlight over bridges was so normal that I had forgotten to treasure it.

Now the flatness of faces on the cold screen is what I see most. When I’m with real people, seeing faces feels not normal, but like a marvel.

The journey from work to home has shrunk for many of us, if there’s work at all. It makes me think how fortunate we are, how much privilege we have. On Zoom happy hours, many of my coworkers vocalize how they never want to go to the office again. I think, they shouldn’t have to. There was plenty not to recommend it.

And yet, I sip my drink and silently think about how what I miss, and what was lost, was that private—yet public—shared liminal space, where we were all beginning or ending our days, trying to arrive on time, trying to get home to, at last, put our feet up. I wonder if, even amid all the inequities about work that have been exposed in this time, they don’t miss this space too.

My workplace, like many, won’t return to its same form—leases have expired, many have shifted to permanently working from home. I don’t know what will replace my small daily journeys, and I have failed at purposefully seeking out something that does, something with the potential for spontaneity and yet regimented. How was that possible, now that I think of it? For both to be inhabited at once? Now, recollecting on my former commute seems like the very contradiction of existence—routine, filled with tedium, and yet, not. Light, banal, normal.

Like a conversation I had once on the N train with the woman one seat over. She was bringing home diapers for her grandson. She shared this with me, then said, nice seeing you, as if we’d knew each other, or would someday see each other again.

BIO:

Anne Ray was raised in Ellicott City, Maryland, and has worked as a waitress, a gardener, an English teacher, and a fish monger. Her linked story collection, SCENIC OVERLOOK, is forthcoming from Awst in 2022. A two-time fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, her fiction received a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in more than 10 literary magazines, including STORY, Indiana Review, and StoryQuarterly. She’s a graduate of the Creative Writing program at Carnegie Mellon University and the MFA program in fiction at Brooklyn College. During the daytime she’s a Senior Editor at Reveal Digital, an archive of radical and alternative press material, a project of JSTOR.