The Commute That Doubled as Therapy
Two trains and a walk, the only hours that were entirely mine.
My therapist charged ninety dollars a session. The 7:42 train charged two dollars and seventy five cents, and it never once asked me how that made me feel.
For three years I paid for both, and if you had forced me to give one up, I am not sure the therapist would have survived the cut.
Here is what my life looked like the year this started. My father died in March. By June my mother had moved into what used to be my office, which meant my desk moved into our bedroom, which meant there was no longer one square foot of the apartment that belonged to me. My husband was kind about it. My seven year old was loud about it. My mother reorganized my kitchen drawers in her first week and called it helping, and the unbearable part is that it was helping, and I still wanted to scream into the freezer.
My job sat on the far side of the city. Two trains and a fourteen minute walk, sixty eight minutes door to door when the transfer behaved. People at work spoke about my commute the way you speak about an illness. “I could never,” Dana from accounts said, shuddering over her salad. “That commute would kill me.”
It was keeping me alive.
The first train was the ugly one. Packed, damp in summer, a smell like wet coats and somebody's egg sandwich. I stood most days, hip braced against the door, watching a man in a brown jacket do the crossword in pen like a maniac. At Fulton I transferred, past the trumpet player who set up by the stairs every morning and played What a Wonderful World a little too slowly, so that it sounded less like a celebration and more like a question. Then the second train, the emptier one, where a window seat on the left side bought you eleven minutes of river.
And here is the thing nobody tells you about grief when you are the daughter, the mother, the wife, and the employee all at once: everyone can reach you. Everyone. At home my mother could ask where the good scissors lived. At work my boss could appear at my shoulder saying “quick question” while holding a folder that was never quick. My phone buzzed with school reminders and pharmacy refills and a group chat about a birthday cake.
But underground, between stations, I was unreachable.
For sixty eight minutes, twice a day, I was no one's anything.
For the first few months I just stared. That was the whole treatment: staring, river, trumpet... staring. Then one morning in October I opened the notes app on my phone and typed four lines about my father's hands, the way his knuckles looked like walnuts, the way he peeled an orange in one long unbroken ribbon and handed you the fruit like it was nothing.
I deleted it. I typed it again. I kept it.
I had not written since college. I told no one I had started. It felt like meeting someone in secret, except the someone was me. One sleepless night I found a page of poetry prompts, and one of them said: write about an object that outlived its owner. The next morning, somewhere under the river, I wrote about my father's reading glasses, which still sat in our junk drawer because no one, including me, could figure out what you are supposed to do with a dead man's way of seeing.
The poems were not good at first. They did not need to be. I was finally writing about the grief instead of around it, which is a distinction my actual therapist had been circling for months. She kept asking, “Where does it sit in your body?” and I kept saying, “I don't know,” and then one Tuesday on the 8:03 I typed, it sits behind my sternum like a swallowed stone, and thought... oh. There it is. Two seventy five.
In spring I did something reckless. I entered the poem about the glasses into a monthly poetry contest, my thumb hovering over the send button through two full station stops... before I pressed it. My ears went hot. The crossword man glanced up like I had laughed out loud. Maybe I had.
The poem did not win.
It made a shortlist, and when the email came I cried in the stairwell at work, and it was not disappointment... or not only that. A stranger somewhere had read about my father's hands. He had been dead fourteen months and he was still meeting people.
Then, in September, the company went permanently remote. There was applause in the all hands meeting. Dana from accounts actually whooped. I should have been thrilled: no more wet coats, no more egg sandwich smell, three extra hours a day returned to me like a refund.
Instead I sat very still while everyone celebrated, feeling like a patient whose medication had just been discontinued for budget reasons.
The unraveling took about a month. My desk was now the kitchen table, where my mother narrated game shows to me whether or not I wore headphones. The quick questions arrived by chat now, all day, from everyone, with no tunnel to hide in. I snapped at my mother over teaspoons. Actual teaspoons, their placement in a drawer. I heard my own voice doing it... and did not recognize the woman it belonged to. That night I opened my notes app and realized I had not written a line in nine weeks.
The train had been a container.
Without it, the days poured into each other and everything I carried spilled.
The train never asked me to be okay. It only asked me to be carried, and some mornings being carried was the whole of what I could manage.
I tried substitutes. Long walks, but the phone came with me and so did the guilt. Sitting in the parked car, but a neighbor knocked on the window to ask if I was alright, which is a fair question to ask a woman staring at her own garage. A bath, interrupted twice. It turns out the magic was never motion. It was permission. A moving train is the only place on earth where doing absolutely nothing is the entire job.
So now it is Thursdays. Every Thursday morning I buy a ticket and ride the line to its last stop and back, ninety minutes round trip, a notebook instead of an office at the other end. The first time, my husband raised an eyebrow. “You're taking the train to nowhere?” he said. “To the end of the line,” I said, as if that were a different thing, and by now I believe it is. My mother calls it my appointment, without irony, and guards it more fiercely than I do.
The poems have changed, too. Less about the stone behind my sternum, more about whatever slowly dissolves it. I did not notice I had started writing toward healing until I read six months of the notebook in one sitting and watched the light change halfway through.
The trumpet player is still at Fulton. Last Thursday I dropped five dollars in his case and he nodded without breaking the melody, one professional to another, both of us doing our slow work in public. He finished the song at the exact moment my train pulled in, which felt, briefly, like the city apologizing. I took the window seat on the left side. The river did what rivers do. And for sixty eight minutes, nobody in the world knew precisely where I was, except me. It turns out that was the appointment all along.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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