Elizabeth descends into the underground.  The F-train.  Her voyage home, made a thousand times before, begins like any other.  The clattering of the tracks, the emphatic murmur of the crowd.  Surrounded by strangers Elizabeth waits on platform.  The smell, the taste, the sights and sounds.  The crying babies, the destitute elderly, the hungry disabled. The black, the white, the Chinese, the Puerto Rican.   The forgotten beggars, the smug rich, the tragic poor. The people having the best day of their lives and those having the worst. Elizabeth doesn’t notice these things anymore.  She’s been living in Manhattan for years now and the commute had been come to be defined by its repetitive nature not its exciting diversity.   The experience once so visceral has become so banal and dissociative it was almost unreal.  Elizabeth checks her cell phone. 6:40 PM.  Another endless day, not quite over.

Elizabeth is more alert than usual of her surroundings.  The voices in the crowd seem to sweep together like the wind.  Cries and echoes swirl as one.  She senses a stillness that she immediately dismisses as an untimely bout of paranoia.  Leaning against the steel pillar Elizabeth closes her eyes and attempts to decompress.  After a wait that could have been 5 minutes or 5 years, the car plows in from the tunnel.  As she lines up to enter the her paranoia returns.  She can’t pinpoint it but something doesn’t feel quite right.  As she enters the car the intensity of the scene overwhelms her.  Suddenly she becomes  overtaken with what feels like vertigo.  Elizabeth struggles to hold herself up right.  Her center of gravity is completely lost, as she sickly peers into a crowd of unfamiliar faces.

And that sound.  A deafening screeching noise but does anyone else hear it?  It doesn’t appear so.  She realizes she cannot focus.  And the train isn’t stopping.  How long had she been in the car she asks herself?  Where’s 34th St.?  23rd?  No luck.  She checks her cell phone.  It’s dead.  She tries to talk but no sound comes out, either that or the hideous noise is drowning her out even to herself.  She screams into the ether.

Panic comes on quickly in situations like this one and Elizabeth’s heart races faster with each beat.  Just as it seems like full madness is about to come on the train stops.  The windows are completely obscured by the darkness beyond the glass.  The conductor announces the destination: “5 Parks Highway” he says in an unusually calm manner.  What?  “5 Parks Highway,?” she blurts out.  The screeching sound is gone now, replaced by the sound of halogen lights and underwater ambience.  She looks around the train and notices everyone is getting off.  She stumbles forward and tries desperately to ask someone where they are.  She’s regained her balance but not her voice.  The panic returns instantly.  The passengers ignore her politely and walk with heads low out the door and into the darkness.  She scans the car feverishly, hoping to find someone who can help her.  Seeing no other option she walks out the door of the now empty train.