Variations on the NY Subway
Written in haste
A quick note from the present:
I wrote these fragments before I left for Korea, at a moment in which I (naively) thought I was at my lowest. I was convinced that I hated New York—and back then, I really was so ready to leave—but as I read these words again now, I am struck by the fondness that runs through them. Perhaps, in spite of my ennui, there was a part of me even then that couldn’t help but feel drawn to the city.
I wrote these words in brief creative spurts while riding the subway alone. For the most part, I have copied them here as they appear in my Notes app, with minimal edits. I believe them to be offspring of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, a text that I initially thought rather pretentious, but now return to with renewed vigor in my desire to understand spleen/ennui.
In this period of life, there is very little that I feel certain about—but the one thing I know without a doubt is that I must return to New York. I am ready to let myself fall in, head over heels; I have never felt so sure of anything.
*****
Sometime between September and October 2022
This morning I am gently caressed by the city. Everything is enveloped in a feathery haze, as though someone has wrapped all of Manhattan’s iron and concrete in semi-transparent gauze. Even the people and their angry wrinkles appear softer somehow, despite the fact that it is so hot outside I am suspended in my own stickiness. Through the window across from me, I see the body of another train whisking past. Its inner lights glow spectrally, and elevated about a foot above my car, it hovers as though afloat in a stream of water, a nameless streak of light. Stakes stationed along the tracks beneath us ripple its cosmic image, beautiful as the full moon reflected upon a still lake.
The subway fills with the cacophonous drone of half-baked intimacies—for what substantive conversation could you possibly have in a vehicle that rumbles as the Earth? I think I love this godawful city. I recognize, and now begrudgingly accept, that I seek myself in its flashing icons. Awash in fluorescence, I give myself over to its pulsing coruscations, disgusted yet hypnotized by its intoxicating fumes. There is nothing else you can do but let yourself be wild and free here, in this dazzling, dizzying playground, where on every other street you are assaulted by a medley of piss and freezer burn wafting out from under the subway grates.
November 29, 2022 11:54 PM
How I feel about/in New York:
ambivalent
angry
annoyed
depressed
very angry
nihilistic
existential grief
The city impinges its dinginess on you and I hate all of it, but I hate the subway the most, with its dim, jaundiced lighting, its noxious perfumes, its bodies packed neck and neck like sardines.
The effect of the city is not just physical deterioration, but also the affect of its bodily malaise. This terribleness inside me emerges from a damaged psyche; the loss of control over my body to rage and despair is an expression of the city’s miasma. We channel the detritus of cities through our bodies.
Sometime in August 2022
I watch two boys embrace across the platform, one a healthy amount taller than the other. They wear matching brown leather boots marked by a black partition riding up the middle, with clipped heels, toes grazing languidly. Their fingers reluctantly creep waist-wise, as they linger a bit longer in this sweet moment limited by the thrumming city engine. It is bustling tonight, for a Thursday, but I still manage to snag a window seat on the D. As I cross the Manhattan bridge, I feel a twinge of longing for florescent lights and the thrill of strangers. For once, I don’t want to return home.
October 10, 2022
Today I was spit on as I exited the subway. I can pinpoint the exact moment: I imagine myself walking up the stairs and out onto Atlantic Avenue, feel a strange, abject dampness on my skin and thinking that it is perhaps something emanating from my own body, aimlessly wipe at my shirt (around the bicep) only to recoil at the feeling of something cold and wet—the rejected fluid of another smeared onto my own. In that moment of recognition a wave of nausea rises up inside me inexplicably—not towards the spit or the subject, but towards myself and my own body. I feel ugly—not because of how small and unassuming I am, not for how lacking in beauty I am (those are old feelings), but for how selfish I can be, how suspicious and flighty I seem, for how concerned I am with my own self-preservation that someone would want to spit on me. That is what I must look like to other POC as an Asian, and I feel shame, because perhaps it has a ring of truth to it.
I am reading Afropessimism on the subway and I am crying because I know what it feels like to not have any space in your head for yourself because you’re perceiving yourself perceiving yourself the way you are being perceived.
Sometime between September and December 2022
The joy I feel crossing the Manhattan bridge and gazing out at the New York City skyline is a superficial kind of happiness—a distraction that momentarily dulls the ache in my heart, but nothing potent like gut-satisfaction. I’m still searching for unbridled joy. I think I feel it at times when I get into a writing flow, or for that brief period in time when I was meditating daily. I feel it when I’m lost in conversation with a friend and we’re ricocheting off each other. N said it best when she described it as the joy of perceiving but not participating. I guess I was just born to be a perceiver.