Invisible Subways

The details, the lifeblood of a writer, have begun to blur together. I'm on the train, again, and a woman gets on, her bag presses into my back; or: I stare out the window at the wall of the tunnel smearing by; or: the sun blinks through the repeating trestles of the Manhattan bridge, blinding me.

I realize that the trains have begun to overlap in my head, and distinguishing between them has become beside the point. Every train ride I describe is the one train ride, repeated, variations on a theme, like different recordings of the same piece of music recorded over and over until the waves of sound, the rising and falling of an unintelligible melody, are all that can be heard.