I’ve reached a point where I prefer the truth of a filthy staircase to the lie of a shiny escalator.

There is something honest about the New York subway. It doesn’t try to impress you; it just watches whether you can survive. I love the weight of it all—the ancient trains, the rats that own the tracks, and the way a sudden brake forces a hundred strangers to dance in a synchronized, involuntary wave.

In the city above, everyone is performing. But down here, the mask slips. You see people reading paperbacks, their thumbs stained with ink, or watching someone fall asleep in that precarious, miraculous way—standing up, sitting down, or simply surrendering to the floor. There is a profound human spirit in the chaos. I love the performers who clearly can’t sing or dance, yet they pour their hearts into it anyway. You realize quickly that they aren't just working for a living; they are working to feel alive.

There is a specific kind of silence that happens under the East River, right where the signal dies and you realize you’ve crossed the border into Brooklyn. It’s a forced meditation. Then there are the delays—the puzzling maps that turn a simple commute into an unplanned expedition. Everyone gets pissed off, of course, except for the friends who get five more minutes to say goodbye.

I’ve spent my best and worst hours on those empty platforms past midnight. It’s where my most promising ideas were born and where my most painful regrets came back. When the train finally arrives with the amber tunnel lights—flickering through the windows, there’s this brief hallucination of time travel. You can’t help but wonder: If I could go back to any point in life, which stop might be right?

She once told me I should propose by the Seine, not on 7th Avenue. I think about that sometimes when the train screams while passing through. She’d still say yes, though. I know that because she understood the subway, too.

We spend so much of our lives being anxious commuters, running for "destinations" we think will finally change us. But after seeing it all, I’ve realized that life isn't waiting for us at the end of the line. Life is the thousands of train rides in between. It is the journey that takes you through the day and the night, and one day, you’ll realize you’ve already arrived.