Feb 8
In a Station of the Metro
Not the Ezra Pound Way
In 2018, I’d never seen a metro station or even boarded a metro train, for that matter. What can I say? Just rural origin things. I temporarily moved to Hyderabad, a metro city in India, one of the biggest things I looked forward to was riding a metro train.
I was lost.
The station was confusing. Entrances and exits all looked the same. To a small-town girl like me, this was beyond mortifying. I thank my lucky stars to this day that I didn’t feel adventurous that evening and attempted to do it all on my own.
I don’t remember much from that day. I was constantly looking back and forth to imprint some photographic image in my head to not get lost the next time I was travelling. Once we were on the boarding platform, I looked for one of those LED boards that showed the minutes due for the next train. And that’s when I was blown away by the sunset.
The sunlight streamed into the concrete and metal structure of the station. I thought it looked really beautiful, seen from within the station. The station looked the same regardless of the angle I stood at and I was tired of the confusing similarity of it all. Stairs that go up and down, escalators that take me to the same place I just came from, elevators that take me to the street below, but where the hell am I once I get there?
For a moment, the sunset changed everything.
I took this one photo on my Nokia phone that day. To this day, when I look back at this photo, I feel all the excitement of riding a metro train for the first time. The joy of having trustworthy friends who knew their way around metro stations!
I’m sure doing something in this story at the metro station, but life is now more like how Jo An Fox-Wright Maddox describes it in her story How to Get Nothing Done in a Day. Times sure have changed, thanks to covid :/ Can’t wait to get back to the metro, but until then, check out her writing!
