Why I Love Taking the Subway (During Lockdown)
This piece was written in November of 2020.
Since last spring, the news have not once failed to remind me that I am among the lucky ones in this current pandemic. It does make it hard not to feel guilty at times when COVID-related anxiety kicks in. I have been struggling with not making everything about myself although the only person I am with these days is… Well, myself.
Like most in France, I am currently in a myriad of long-distance relationships with almost everyone I know. For weeks now, nearly all spaces of socialization have been condensed into a single squared screen. Only a couple of clicks separate a friendly video-call from an online Zoom seminar. A superficial line subsists between the leisure of Netflix and a dreaded academic essay. And sadly I have found myself spending more time on my phone as a principal form of distraction, so as to repress the spiralling pessimism that easily creeps up on me lately.
Prior to president Macron’s announcement of the most recent national lockdown, I had never yet considered it a privilege to freely ride the subway. The new regulations strongly limit any movement outside of one’s home and social interactions, and only allow the use of public transportation for a concise list of activities deemed “essential”. As I still have the (oh-so-precious) permission to venture through metro stations in the empty heart of Paris on my way to work, I am realizing now that it is a ritual that is just appeasing enough for me to momentarily forget about the current crisis. It makes me overlook for a little while the future’s uncertainty and the apprehensions around it.
As someone who has lived in big cities for most of her life, I have taken my fair share of public transportation and love them. Besides their utility, they are also underrated and dependable places for self-reflection, people-watching, reading, and sometimes even unexpected encounters. To this day, I still look back fondly at buses, trains, and subways that mediated the special memories I formed in them; I think of the inside jokes with classmates on our way to school, the impromptu week-end trips with friends, the hello and goodbye kisses in front of exits, the noteworthy thoughts that inadvertently pop up in-between two stops, and the conversations with strangers who ask about the book I’m reading. Needless to say, I wasn’t so acutely aware of the charm behind these moments in the past as I am right now.
They say it’s the little things in life; today, when I take the steps that lead me down the underground railway in the morning, I get to forget about the dispiriting circumstances that take place above my head, up in the real world. I can distract myself without having to seek for diversions in social media feeds and television shows. Sure, the absence of the usual rush hour and the presence of sanitary masks still hint at the present state of affairs, but I have found so much to be grateful for in this outing I get to keep. The PA speakers announce the trains which still roll in at the right times everyday, a constant I am happy to weirdly benefit from. And sometimes, a little miracle happens: the other day, I had stepped off the train from the wrong door and was alone on the dock with another man who had made the same mistake as me. We found the right line together and walked down the deserted corridor of the Charles de Gaulle–Étoile station, like two ghosts in a domain that was once populated by other anonymous faces like ours.
While outwardly romanticizing a form of public transport – especially in a city like Paris – might sound like an excessively cheesy (and slightly pretentious) thing to do, I look at it as a calming coping mechanism. It is difficult to hold onto a sense of normalcy when much of the physical commodities directly associated with routine and regularity has been altered or suspended. I think that it has become so easy these days to magnify and stay fixated on the negatives, that if it is the opposite that I’m doing with the subway, then so be it.
I will gladly continue taking my seat in a moving tube that carries me outside of the usual 1-kilometer-perimeter that is allowed by the government, even if the path that follows the end of the tunnel leads me to a destination I don’t necessarily look forward to reaching. And although I still have no idea what my life will look like in even two months from now, I am happy I get to say that at least “I still have the metro”.