I Miss Crying on the Subway
I was on my commute home from work last month when I felt it — the familiar pricking behind my eyes before they glazed over completely. The sea of subway advertisements blurred to water, and I tried hard to disguise my smattering of splotchy tears for an intense fixation on the poster overhead. IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING it read. I blinked twice, three times, through damp lashes and read it over. If you see something, don’t say anything, please. Don’t ask, “are you OK?” Just afford me a moment of privacy and look away.
To cry on the subway is to be knighted as a New Yorker.
Under the fluorescent lights of the L train, I sunk into an open seat — flanked either side by a Uniqlo ultra-light down jacket to my left and The Goose to my right — with a distinctive ‘schwoop’ sound, like wriggling into a sleeping bag. For several reasons, it had been a hard day. As the doors closed, the mask between my composed public exterior and the bubbling internal grief beneath it broke, and I choked out a litany of sad, silent sobs I reassured myself no one could see over their fur-lined hoods.
I’ve come to realise that there really isn’t anywhere to cry in New York when you need it but in plain sight. And that’s OK because people in this city do a lot of things in plain sight. They shovel down $12 salads with their mouths hanging open. They urinate into sidewalk grates emitting plumes of eerily warm steam onto the street. They make out with drunken passion on the subway platform. There is apathy in recognising commuters will probably never see you again, and if they do, they surely won’t remember you crying.
I was dancing around the MoMa recently looking at art, trying to discern the appropriate amount of time to spend reading each accompanying plaque, when an incoming call request buzzed through my phone. B💘 WANTS TO FACETIME YOU. I picked up at 4 am her time with a frantic “what’s the matter?” as the gallery guard flashed me a huffed expression to cut the call. The view of her blue eyes, glued together by mascara, blurred in pixelated streaks across the screen. “One sec, I’m just going to my room,” she babbled across the world. As the bedroom door swung shut, suddenly we were just two friends splayed across her bed, tearfully analysing a fight with her boyfriend.
As teenagers, we would pull up to my house in a parked car after dark, Iggy Azalea down, heating up, and discuss the intimate details of our adolescent lives. It was as though the walls of the car formed around us, encasing us in a vestibule of complete confidentiality. We called these car debriefs “the cone of silence”. In the suburbs, privacy is afforded by closing doors; bedroom doors, car doors or otherwise. In New York City, we find sanctity in standing clear of the closing doors. Underground, entangled amongst a hundred nameless, faceless passengers, we carve out alcoves of physical and emotional space, “cones of silence” if you will, within the public sphere.
One of the main ways to demarcate space on the subway is by wearing headphones. Headphones are an outward indication of our inward focus. They convey to the world that while cocooned in an echo-chamber of our inner thoughts, we don’t wish to be interrupted. By the same token, passengers who play their music aloud claim a much more expansive physical space, one that intrudes into our own.
It was the tinny music cranking from a subway performer’s speaker that interrupted my train of thought the last time I cried. Staring through blotchy vision at a wash of millennial start-up posters advertising “10% off with the code SUBWAY” — I was hit by the sudden and unnerving realisation that I was headed in the opposite direction: uptown. “Shit!” I thought out loud, clenching my jaw to keep from crying harder still.
Cities really are a reflection of the way you feel inside. When you’re happy in ‘The City That Never Sleeps’ you’re filled with all the charisma of a four-year-old, lying awake in their bed at night out of sheer excitement for their birthday. When you’re sad, the city collapses around you in a way so compressing and so brutal, New Yorkers retreat underground almost instinctively, like moles burrowing into the earth. The subway is a subterranean safe haven; the arms of the turnstile there to embrace us after an exhausting day spent holding back tears. In this city, the first place we have to let our guard down is often plonked amongst a sea of strangers.
I have a propensity to cry on the subway. The number of MTA tears shed have accumulated this year like points on my Sephora card. Teetering back and forth between Brooklyn and Manhattan on the L, I choked out angry, remorseful sobs after picking a fight with my best friend. On a Queens-bound J train, my eyes brimmed with tears as I hugged goodbye to my mum, whose flight back to Australia departed in 4 hours.
Crying on the subway is truly a form of emotional exhibitionism. We allow passengers to see us vulnerable and totally disarmed, while never expecting them to intervene. Sometimes having a stranger acknowledge your Public Displays of Emotion, (even when they’re inadvertently forced to by sharing your subway car), is cathartic enough to absolve the pain. Enough to find the outside edges of yourself again when you feel fuzzy from emotions. Enough, so that when you exit through the turnstiles and are spewed back onto the streets, you’ve been granted a moment to gather yourself with composure.
When compared to the tears shed chopping onions, the emotionally fuelled variety contains higher levels of protein. Protein makes tears more viscous; they stick to our cheeks more easily and run down our faces much slower. One theory devised by researchers at the University College of London is that we want our tears to be seen by onlookers. This is because the same neuronal areas of the brain light up when we see a passenger on the subway in pain as though we’re emotionally aroused ourselves. In short: our tears lead to a cascading release of empathy and compassion in others.
Compassion on the subway is typically reserved for small head nods and aversion of eye contact, granting the crier a sense of privacy. In the weeks following 9/11, however, subway etiquette diverged. “I’ll never forget in the days after, seeing the woman next to me just awash with tears” recites my coworker, Janice. “Before I had a moment to consider, the passenger to her other side had already extended a hand bearing a pocket-sized pack of Kleenex. Meanwhile, a man standing nearby asked if she’d lost someone in the attacks. The camaraderie in that moment was palpable”.
There is validation in being noticed in a state of suffering, which makes sense because New York is an exhibitionist city — the subway is its most humble public arena, and we are its performers. You don’t have to be breakdancing along the F train, hoisting your body against the subway pole in fluid motions, to be an entertainer. You perform while crying into the sleeve of your jacket on the journey home. On the subway, lives merge, and though at times you may be brought to tears, station by station, you keep on moving.
