They Painted My Poem on the Metro Wall
Eight feet tall, read by thousands who will never know my face.
There is a wall in the Concord Street metro station that knows more about me than my dentist does.
Painted on it, eight feet tall, in cream letters on brick the color of a storm, are nine lines I wrote at one in the morning four winters ago, wearing a bathrobe, eating cereal straight from the box. Roughly three hundred thousand people move through that station every month. On a good month, maybe half of them look up.
None of them look at me.
That is the deal, and it is a better deal than I ever thought to ask for.
The poem is called "Everyone Here Is Going Somewhere Loved." I wrote it the winter I moved to this city knowing exactly one person, a cousin who worked nights and answered texts in single emojis.
My apartment was a studio above a laundromat, and my entire social life was the metro: twenty-two minutes each way, packed shoulder to shoulder with strangers who all seemed to be expected somewhere, awaited by someone, while I rode toward an empty room that smelled like other people's dryer sheets.
One night I got off at my stop and could not make myself climb the stairs, because at the top of the stairs... was nothing.
So I sat on the platform bench and I watched faces and I started assigning them destinations. The man in the paint-flecked boots: a daughter who saves him the crossword. The woman with the cello case: someone who warms her side of the bed with a hot water bottle, badly, every night. The kid asleep against the window of the departing train: a mother who will pretend she was not waiting up.
It started as a game and turned into a poem about loneliness that refuses to say the word even once. Nine lines. I typed it into my phone right there on the bench, went upstairs, ate my cereal, finished it in the bathrobe, and felt, for about ninety seconds... completely unalone.
I did nothing important with it. I posted it on a community wall for poets, where it gathered a modest cluster of hearts and one comment from a stranger in another country: "I read this on a train." That felt like the poem's entire natural life. Born, read by forty people... asleep.
Two years later the transit authority announced something I did not know cities did. An open call: poems by local writers, to be painted permanently in twelve stations. I had honestly never thought about public art poetry as a thing with an application form, a deadline, and a word limit. A friend forwarded me the call with a three-word message: "Do it, coward."
The rules said under sixty words, by a resident, about the city. Mine was fifty-one words and was not about the city so much as about what the city does to a person at one in the morning. I decided that was close enough, sent it, and forgot it the way you forget a coin dropped into a fountain.
The email came in June. Out of two thousand entries, twelve poems.
Mine was assigned to Concord Street.
My stop. The platform with the bench. Whoever made that pairing did it by accident, which is the only proof of fate I am willing to accept.
Watching it go up was the strangest week of my life. Two muralists did the work, a woman named Priya and a wiry man everyone called Chalk, and I invented reasons to pass through the station while they gridded the wall in blue lines and scaled my handwriting into something the size of a garage door.
On the third day Priya noticed me hovering and said, "You keep coming back. You like poems?" I said, "That one's mine." Chalk came down off the ladder, shook my hand with a hand covered in cream paint, and said, "No kidding. We had a bet you were a transit inspector."
There was no unveiling.
No ribbon, no speech, no plastic cups of warm wine. One Tuesday it was simply finished, and the scaffolding was gone, and the city went back to ignoring everything at its usual magnificent scale.
Except now I get to do the thing. The thing nobody warns you about.
I get to stand on a public platform and watch strangers read my heart with their morning faces on.
A nurse coming off a night shift, scrubs under her coat, stopped in front of it last October and read the whole thing with her lips moving, and at the end she nodded once, like the wall had said something she had been waiting to hear confirmed. Two teenagers photographed it and argued about whether it was sad or happy, and one of them said, "It's both, idiot," which is the finest criticism my work has ever received. An older man in a transit uniform told the woman next to him it was probably written by "some dead poet." I was standing close enough to correct him... I bought a coffee instead and let myself be dead and famous for one entire afternoon.
Eight feet tall and completely anonymous is exactly the size a poet should be.
I think about that a lot. For years I wanted the other thing, the name, the face, the introduction at parties. I chased it the way you chase anything you are sure will fix you.
And then a city crew with rollers and a grid gave me the opposite, a voice with no body attached, and it turned out the voice was the whole point. The poem does not need me on the platform. It works the night shift without me. It talks to people I will never meet, at hours I am asleep, in a tone I could not manage in person because in person I would ruin it by being nervous.
The poem began, if I trace it honestly, with an exercise I had stolen from a page of prompts months earlier: write about strangers as if you love them. I had rolled my eyes at it. Sentimental, I thought. Then I sat on a bench at the bottom of my own staircase because I could not face an empty room, and the sentimental exercise turned out to be a load-bearing wall.
My cousin finally saw it this spring. He works days now. He stood in front of it for a long time, then texted me from thirty feet away, a single emoji, a small yellow face crying in what I have decided is joy.
Here is the part I did not expect. I used to get off at Concord Street and feel the loneliness rise up the stairs with me like cold air.
Now I get off the train and something is waiting for me.
It cannot hug me... It cannot ask about my day. But it stands there, eight feet tall, holding the exact words I needed at my worst, and it says them to everyone, forever, including me.
Some nights I take the last train home on purpose. The platform empties, the board says NO FURTHER SERVICE, and the wall and I have the station to ourselves. The train pulls out and its windows slide light across the paint, line by line, like a finger moving under the words, teaching the city to read.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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