“This Train Will Not Be Servicing L’Enfant Plaza”

The christmas lights I keep around my darkened, jammed-shut window cast a caramel haze of light around the wooden-panel edges.

That caramel haze soothes my heart, which currently beats harsh and quick, thick in my mouth like the taste of coal for Sunday breakfast.

One dead, eighty-three hospitalized.

But I didn't know; I was coming home from work when the operator announced, “This train will not be servicing L'Enfant Plaza.”

“Here we go again,” I thought.

Snow and freezing rain have caused delays over the last week throughout the WMATA Metro system. Sometimes, when you get into a train car, you can taste the burnt smell that envelops you.

One dead, eighty-three hospitalized.

My coworker with the deep heart— and eyebrows that raise at every absurd thing I say— wouldn't leave at 5 pm with me. Earlier, we had sworn to our supervisor (somewhat jokingly) that we would leave an hour or two before our normal 5 pm departure time.

But as we joked—she worked on her resume, while I researched literary agents and Glee—a train sat a few stops down, filling up with smoke the way bodies fill up with water.

A hazy river was penetrating every car like that shot heard round the world, with people I’d probably ridden with before, drifting in and out of conscious. (I think of the older women I've marveled at on those trains and my eyes start to burn and ache.)

The Washington Post reported that “passengers watched out for each other, sharing inhalers with those who were having trouble breathing”. The train, like a thumb stuck in a shut door, sat in the tunnel for forty-five minutes before firefighters arrived to evacuate.

I wish I’d been there. To do…something?

Maybe I just wanted to suffer with them. Because one person wouldn’t leave the train she boarded, as if on a normal afternoon ride. Maybe I just wanted to sit with her; to make sure she was held, talked to, soothed. Everyone deserves that.

And the short of the long of it is that life comes at you from undisclosed locations promising no storks or babies or next-year-birthdays. Life, sometimes, is like a letter lined with messages we aren't ready to read.

But they come anyways.

So while we can, let’s make sure no one goes alone. Sometimes the holiest work is in making sure that loneliness doesn't perpetuate someone’s existence.

If someone let’s you, be brave enough to break through and stifle the night, the pain, the sorrow—for just a second longer. Because a second longer may be all we have. Ready or not.

Make sure I see you before I leave tomorrow morning. I want to have the option of “goodbye”. I want to make sure we both know, whether it’s today or twenty years, that we have the option of “each other”.

Your face—or the stranger’s that smiled at you today—is the sweetest parting gift this world could give. That is the point of “a metro story”, a project I started when I moved to D.C. five months ago.

To bring light to the overwhelming feeling that each of us, WMATA Metro Commuters, share a piece of our days together; but we rarely interact. To bring light to the fact that there is beauty in each one of our stories, if we only learn to ask. Your face is the sweetest parting gift this world could give.

Please, don’t hold back.