I believed myself a kind person for offering seats, minding the position of my bag, and stepping out of the train and onto the platform for a few measly seconds so people might get on with their days a little quicker. But there you stood at rush hour on a packed subway car – immovable.
You stood impervious no matter how many people struggled past; no matter how loudly I whispered “just move, asshole,” hoping my passive-aggressive plea would sear through you like a bolt of righteous lightning – that it would call your body suddenly to action! But you remained unfazed. I deemed you a jerk, a prick, a prig, a dingus, a generally uncaring person, and someone definitely not raised in the Midwest and certainly not raised in the rural Midwest.
But I was wrong.
Moving just so people might arrive five minutes early to their jobs where creativity is beat down by rows of uniform cubicles? Where the real boss is profit margins? Where the only silver lining is a Keurig machine? A KEURIG MACHINE?! No. You refuse to waste even the smallest amount of energy on a fleeting distraction from workplace inequality, biased hiring practices, and the toilet someone left an unflushed turd in.
Moving just so children might arrive on time to educational institutions where at best they’ll leave with a middling knowledge base at the expense of overworked and underpaid teachers? And at worst they’ll leave steeped in anxiety and self-doubt at the hands of an oppressive system designed to reward the same kinds of “traditional” learners who developed it?! Your stalwart position foists upon them a vital lesson, that the only way to protest a patriarchal, whitewashed education is with tiny elbows forging new pathways jab by itty-bitty jab!
Moving just so an elderly woman can shuffle toward death without her already-overlooked existence diminished further as she is forced to squeeze past you? You, the Dirty Harry of the Subway, stand directly in the way of the exit as a reminder that there is no exit from the indignity of aging except for one’s own terminal exit from life!
Moving just so people might arrive home sooner to their dogs? Dogs who can sniff out drugs and bombs and perform amusing tricks for a whiff of peanut butter, but because of 15,000 years of domestication would die in the streets without human intervention?! Nonsense! You pet a dog as a child once and immediately recognized that a wagging tail is not joy, it’s a ruse!
You, the disruptor! You, the revolutionary! You, whose own mother once described him as a “brutal little mystery I hesitate to call a boy!”
The poet Mark Strand wrote, “We all have reasons / for moving. / I move / to keep things whole.” Not you, the Outlaw Josey Wales of the underground – you won’t move so that we must reckon with the pieces of misery pummeling us from every direction. You force us to become stronger, to look directly into the eye of misery, just as you look into the eye of misery each and every morning while inserting your cold, hard contact lenses. And for that, I am grateful.
But like Maggie Fitzgerald asks Frankie Dunn in Million Dollar Baby, I am begging you, dear stranger, to let me off the hook. I got all the lessons I needed on this train. I got them all! And now I’ve got this chardonnay that’s not gonna throw an ice cube in itself – and I’m asking, I’m begging – please help me end my commute, and move!
