Carol’s heels clicked on the worn cement. The subway system was always darker at night, which was ridiculous because there aren’t any windows so natural light shouldn’t matter. She glanced behind her and clutched her worn pea coat even more tightly around her. It wasn’t the light, she decided, it was the people. Every morning she traversed these dank hallways, dodging men looking only at their cellphones and women teetering in heels and pencil skirts. It was the rushing, the power of knowing that you needed to be somewhere and that someone was depending on you. Every morning was bursting with the hope of what lay ahead in the new day and the people riding the trains reflected this feeling of infinite possibility.
Then there was the occasional rider who strolled leisurely onto the train, a newspaper in hand, smirking idly as if he were the Cheshire cat. These riders seemed to have nowhere to be, they rode for the simple enjoyment of observing the 7:00 a.m. masses bustling about. Carol liked to call these people the Cats, and they annoyed her to no end because they considered themselves above the average working person. She could just see them thinking how much more informed they were as they thumbed through the entertainment section of the paper. They put themselves above the stress of having a job, of conforming or succumbing or whatever they thought was just so inferior to living the working life. It wasn’t just that they sniffed at working, because it was obvious that most of them had money; it was the plain irrelevance of them. They weren’t grounded like the rest of the stockbrokers in suits or construction workers or restaurant waiters, the Cats weren’t needed, they didn’t have the glimmer of hope or the frantic dizziness of needing to do a job and get there on time. Every morning Carol looked for a Cheshire cat because they made her feel a bit better. Her job took everything out of her and left her exhausted, but at least she wasn’t one of them.

Riding at night was different. Carol peered down at her clicking heels as she walked. Each sharp step she took was distinctly audible in the silence that surrounded her. Carol hated silence in the city; she was so constantly bombarded with the city’s noise that silence seemed unnatural. She was glad her shoes could fill it. The lack of movement and body heat made the November air bite harder. It seemed to Carol that the tunnel she was walking in was slowly dimming, helping to confirm her theory that, without human life, everything down there seemed so much darker. Carol disliked that part of the day the most, the flipside to the morning. The people riding the subway at this hour were the ones with the unforgiving jobs that no one else wanted – and the unforgiving lives. The glimmer of anticipation and optimism that might have been in their eyes in the morning had dissipated by now – they were drained and irritable. Maybe they woke up this morning with a sense of vast possibility unsullied by past mistakes, but by now they knew it was just the same old, same old. Carol wished she couldn’t relate, but she was akin to them and their sufferings. She sighed, watching her moist, visible breath swirl and writhe up into the dark air. She leaned on a hard concrete pillar, having arrived where her train would pull in. A few others waited also, sprawled on whatever empty space could relieve worn feet. A man was sitting on a green bench adjacent to Carol, his head bent almost as if he were in prayer. The man rested his eyes, though he wasn’t sleeping. His mouth would turn up occasionally as if he was visited by a pleasant thought tipping off Carol that he was awake, yet his guard was so utterly dropped that Carol had only seen a person this approachable and harmless while they were sleeping. His left sneaker tapped swiftly on the ground, and every so often he would bob his head as if dancing to a song. Carol had the urge to speak to him, to break the vow of subway silence.

She considered what she would say to the man. Carol was one of the few people left in New York who valued simple, meaningless conversation that had no agenda and took up time. It relaxed her greatly. But she knew that he didn’t know that she was harmless and thought better of saying anything. A crisp breeze whistled its way down the dank subway tunnel and the deep rumbling of the oncoming train alerted her to gather her thoughts and step closer to the edge of the cement. The train surged past at the speed of light before coming to a groaning halt. The overhead voice tittered the same warning about watching one’s step. Carol tuned the automated voice out; she stepped into the train and easily found a seat.
Devoid of the hordes of commuters, the practically empty cabin enabled Carol to examine the train’s imperfections. The subways of New York were tired and dirty. New York’s inhabitants had no particular love for their subways; they were a means to an end, a tool used to arrive at a destination; essential to the process but not the product. They whizzed beneath the impervious city, unappreciated except by the homeless who occasionally sought a temporary harbor on the worn seats at night. She stared without seeing through the dim lighting of the car and breathed in the scent of the public. It seemed to Carol that when people were bored or between points of purpose in their lives, they defaced things. If she looked under her seat she’d find a collage of sporadically placed chewing gum or the remnants of torn up wrappers and plastic. The Defacers trashed and vandalized in the name of boredom and lack of composed thought. The other sort of riders on the train were the Thinkers, the people who drew themselves into deep pockets of their minds because there was nothing better for them to do while sitting on the subway. The Thinkers always had a blank, faraway stare, the kind of stare that seems like sleeping but isn’t because the eyes are wide open and unseeing. Carol imagined the Thinkers’ minds slowly drifting into the philosophical matters no one really cares to contemplate; the chicken or the egg, religion, extraterrestrial life - topics that surpass the range of what the human brain finds conceivable. These subjects, if pondered too quickly or for too long, can render people seeing their lives and values as insignificant or nonsensical. Thinkers sometimes vandalized the subway as well, but not for similar reasons as Defacers. On occasion, Thinkers breached the outermost spectrum of the comprehensible, getting thrown for a loop when realizing the relative insignificance of their daughter’s dance recital or their uncle’s wedding reception. The Thinkers are then prone to marking the subway in a more permanent way; the carving of a name, or the name of a lover, ripping away part of the plastic seating. This act of mutilation was remarkably grounding; it helped to pull their minds back into condensed bubbles, it drew them away from breaking into the brilliance that they had come so close to tapping. Carol knew all of this because she considered herself to be one of them, although she had yet to delve so deeply into her conscience that she felt the need to vandalize.

“Excuse me?” Carol jerked out of her thoughts and realized the man from the bench next to her was addressing her. His accent was unfamiliar. His words had a lilt to them that reminded Carol of somewhere in the Mediterranean. She got a better look at him; his attire was clean and understated and his heavy backpack at his side made Carol believe he was a traveler. He had olive skin and dark eyes rimmed with smile lines. He held a book in his lap and she guessed that he was about her age, not quite thirty.
“Yes?” Carol’s voice came out slightly strangled as she hadn’t used it in about an hour and she was startled by his sudden attention.

“Forgive me, but I just need to know what you are thinking about.” He said it so matter-of-factly that Carol needed a moment to ponder what he meant. She narrowed her eyes a tad, wondering just how to respond. This guy was either a tourist or crazy, as no one living in New York City would blatantly ask such a personal question without cause.

Not knowing what to say, she simply answered “Why?” The man chuckled and Carol observed that it lit up his face.

“I do not mean to frighten you, but you seemed so far away in your thoughts and I was intrigued.” Carol resisted the urge to laugh. She couldn’t imagine how she would explain to this man that she had been thinking about the fact that people tend to get lost in their thoughts on the subway.

“It was nothing important,” she said, twitching in her seat. The intensity and kindness of his eyes was so unlike what she was used to when dealing with people in general that she squirmed. It felt as if he was accessing every thought that had passed through her since she entered the station. He again broke the silence: “One’s personal thoughts are always important to either us or to someone else. How would you know if your blasé contemplations are actually the cure to someone’s unhappiness? What if they are a cure to my unhappiness? Or hers?” The man gestured to an old woman sitting a few benches away from Carol. There were deep-set lines along her face, beaten into her skin by life’s hardships. Her hands, spotted and contorted with age, shook slightly as she thumbed through the pages of the New York Post. Carol didn’t know this woman, let alone this man sitting across from her, but she suddenly wished her thoughts were powerful enough, beautiful enough, to make a difference for both of them.

“I don’t know. I don’t know the troubles that make you both unhappy, and who’s to say that that woman is unhappy. Age doesn’t always mean unhappiness; it’s just your body’s slow progression into a state of exhaustion. Being unhappy and being tired are very different things.” Carol could feel her voice grow more indignant and loud and she blushed at her unprecedented passion.
The man smiled and nodded his head calmly, “A valid point - maybe you should tell her that very thing.” He chuckled, and then went on, “then again, if that woman is like most in this city, she will end up hitting you with her handbag and screaming if you get too close and make conversation.” Carol laughed. It was the truth for the greater population of old women in New York City. The lady looked up from her paper and glanced at the man and then at Carol, her eyes heavy with suspicion and maybe a hint of disapproval. Carol couldn’t help but laugh again. The man smiled also, but then spoke. “It’s a shame, really,” he sighed, keeping his gaze on Carol.
“What’s a shame?” She asked, hating that this man intrigued her so much. She felt an immediate bond with him, that they could be kindred spirits destined to be friends until, like the woman with the newspaper, they too had age spots on their hands and disapproval for those young and full of life.
The man leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, and his eyebrows shot up in a way that made Carol believe he was about to say something important. “This is the city of possibilities, where you come to follow dreams and find whatever you are desperately searching for. The city is open to anyone who dares to take it in full stride and set themselves up and apart from everything else. But despite all of the rule breakers, innovative thinkers, and trend setters alike, this city is the most closed off and cold one that I have ever visited.” He raised his hands and gestured all around him. “You can be anybody you like here, but you can’t share it with the city. You cannot relate with people similar to yourself on the street or talk to them - society does not think it acceptable and prudent, or even safe. Here, everyone is closed except to themselves and a small circle of confidants. The people, the possibilities, the feelings and emotions of everything that makes New York New York are closed; even the sky, one cannot see the stars. From every story I had read, I have waited a lifetime to come here and fall in love with this city and instead I find that the city has no love to give.” He sat back and took a deep breath.
Carol took a moment to think. She didn’t know why she was talking to this man, or why he seemed to want to give her all of his answers to life and the city. All she knew was that she agreed with him. She looked down at the floor of the train car. “I miss the stars,” she said quietly, as if she were speaking only to herself. “I miss the sounds of my neighborhood- moms calling grass stained kids in for dinner, saying hello to the Michelsons as I ran past them on their evening dog walk. I miss being tucked inside a maze of matching two-stories, lit by televisions glowing with Sunday night football. But I always believed there was so much more.” She turned her gaze upwards until she made eye contact with the man. “You’re right - this city is closed. And I do miss the stars.” She looked down again, appalled that she had shared such intimate information with a stranger. He was making her really think about her life in the city. Carol had moments where her dream was so close, she could almost clasp it, but then her job and her friends and her responsibilities and sometimes even the city itself, knocked it out of her reach. And what about everything she had given up? He had exposed her fear that she would stay in this perpetual limbo between home and here, success and defeat. Carol couldn’t find a category for the man, and it unnerved her. Like the Cats, he seemed calm and content, but he lacked their pompous swagger. He didn’t have the bored look of the Defacers, and although it seemed that he pondered everything a great deal, he wasn’t afraid of his thoughts like the Thinkers.
“I am sorry you are devoid of stars.” His frown drew into a small smile, “I have been gone from my home in Greece for only a month and I can’t bear not seeing them each night.”
“I used to miss them more, but eventually I became used to the smog and artificial light and I lost the feeling that they used to provoke.” She shrugged her shoulders.
“That is a shame. We shouldn’t forget what we love or what makes us happy. Do you know why I love the stars?” he asked, she guessed it was a rhetorical question because she didn’t know anything about him. “I love them because they remind me that I there is a greater purpose to everything and they humble me because, compared to their vast majesty, my problems seem so small.”
Suddenly the automated voice came overhead, marking a stop. The man picked up the shoulder bag next to him and stood. “Your eyes invite conversation and I thank you for that – I hope this city does not veil them.” With that, he turned to walk off the train. Carol didn’t want their conversation to end yet; she felt like there was so much more they had to discuss, so many things about their pasts they had in common. She had an urge to run after him, but the automated voice announced that the doors would soon be closing. Her hand reached out to grab the metal bar next to her. She closed her eyes and braced herself as the train jolted into motion.