Journey

Walking across a platform, carefully avoid the lines.  Step, tile after tile, placing each foot carefully, squarely, in the middle of each grimy rectangle.  Faster, faster, the challenge is to keep it up, without mistakes.  The lighting is too harsh here, and the eyes, they implore me to keep my gaze on my worn shoes, and the grid of lines sliding by beneath me.  Stop.  This is where the third door of the conductor's car will stop.  I like to guess correctly.  But the day has been long, though they should say, heavy.  The day has been heavy and weighs down on my back and on my shoulders, but especially on my eyes.  And my feet are antsy, antsy to walk and walk, step and step, try to run away.  Try to run away and step just so, directly into a somewhere else the day can't follow.  But the fluorescent lighting is too harsh, the lines of the grid too solid, the edges are all too crisp and sharp, and the tired, dull faces staring back from the platform across the tracks all know it can't be done.

Metallic rails converge and fade into the black tunnel at the platform's end.  An empty gaping maw of darkness bored directly through the underbelly of the city.  And I gaze off at the points of black where the rails shed their light and join the pitch dark, waiting for the amber glow of headlights feeling their way through the tunnel, illuminating the tracks golden to herald its arrival.  I watch, waiting for those silver lines to blaze into a firy gold, waiting for the illuminated "D" set centered in the middle of a glowing pool of orange.