"Please stand back behind the yellow line"

34th street station.
A center of chaos.
Buzzing workers short on patience and
ambling tourists abundant with leisure
whizz by in a collection
of faces I’ll forget.
My senses only register
the signs that direct my path.

I watched two decades of life speed by
on the NQR subway lines.
For a certain bubble of forever
my only compass was my mother,
my reliance on her was the force
that placed me on the train headed
Downtown for build-your-own burgers
on Bay Ridge Ave.

Nowadays I’m headed Uptown
for a nine-to-five on 49th street,
joining the massive hive of
people in suits with a
phone in one hand and a
coffee in the other.
It all started with myself and Google Maps
and the arrows above my head.
Thousands of steps have ingrained
this routine in my feet.
My muscle memory and me.

On lucky days
the train welcomes its doors to me
just as I reach the platform.
But sometimes the train chugs
a little too fast,
(I’m a little too slow),
leaving me standing in the humid station with
a crowd of “excuse me’s” and
an all-consuming smoke of independence.
From behind the yellow line
my eyes try to follow
where the time has gone.

But a new train always arrives
for me and
when I stare into the window long enough, I catch
the faintest glimpse of the young girl
clinging on to her mother’s hand
in my reflection.
A little pitter patter of rain
against the roof and
a few more bodies in this train car
are all it takes to tug on that
bittersweet longing
to be Little Miss Dependent again.

Her image fades by the time
I’ve made it to 49th.