The subway lines in Boston are as different from one another as the planets in the sky. You might as well say you’re on Mars to ride the Orange Line; poor forgotten Pluto is the only match pathetic enough for Blue, slithering
underground to the airport. To ride the Red Line was something like crashing along on Jupiter, with its mass greater than all the others combined. Not that the size itself of the Red Line was what was impressive, but the rumble
of those trains, the lights splashing against the deepest tunnels — the ride from Ashmont to Alewife could be violent at times. There were moments like death + rebirth; a body felt enveloped in the cars, wrapped in cheap carpet
+ plastic seats like a tomb, protected by vulgar tinted windows. Then suddenly to fly out from underground, emerging over the Charles River: If you could grab ahold of Icarus’ shoulders as he cut through the sky, that was the
sensation of rising over the bridge on the way to Mass General Hospital, blinking back the sunlight as it tinkled on the water, flying again underground past the sad sterility of Kendall Square, past the wet-eyed junkies at
Central Square. So much mythology there.
I lived on the cracked + faded Green Line, which moves skittishly above-ground like an old house cat; to get home, we creeped from stop to stop as though each were a new shallow
dish of milk, lapping up passengers here + there with a rough tongue + indifferent attitude. To switch to Red was a muscular surge, an explosion of light + sound, screeching wheels, + aggressively intellectual conversation.
(There’s no escaping the latter on a subway line making stops at Harvard + MIT.)
I got on the train + sat between two others; I was weighed down by the book I was carrying. By “weighed down,” I don’t simply mean the
physical heft of the thing, though that definitely was part of it: a single-volume collection of contemporary poetry, those thin, leaf-life pages filled with Ezra Pounds, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings. My poets. My
people.
On the Red Line that one afternoon, I cracked the spine + opened the book to read: it was still stiff + new from the store shelf. I lost myself in between the pages. Then I got to it, this one poem I adored,
+ I remembered everything: the fluttering of the lines that undid me as an awkward gazette of a teen, the words that showed my weakness + my foolishness for poetry.
I remember as a high schooler feeling like I’d been
taken into a warm bath after a walk in the snow, my hands turning pink again under water so hot it almost hurt, though it still felt so necessary + healing on my skin. That was the moment I fell in love with writing. Writing
like this, I had thought, was utterly beautiful.
I have eaten the plums
that were in the icebox
& which you were probably saving for breakfast.
Forgive me, they were delicious:
So sweet & so cold.
Now,
as an adult, on a subway train between stations on my way to a museum, I looked up + away from the page with a startle: a tear had fallen on the page, a hot trail was left on my cheek. My eyes caught the face of a woman across
from me, my age, also reading. She also looked up from her book + caught me in a sniffle, like a child smelling like hot cocoa + cookies. Actually, literally sniffling on the subway, wiping away tears.
The train came
above-ground. I looked away, the sunlight fighting through those grimy tinted windows; it glinted on the choppy surface of the Charles. I went back to my poetry. I could have stayed there the rest of my life.
