Wait. What Happened on the Subway?

It arrived with a snap.

My puffy eyes caught it between the jolts of Tuesday's beige morning commute. I was in my usual spot, standing in the 8:15 green line car. The one that always landed right in front of the stairway entrance. The bridge of an acoustic cover swirled around my headphones, a modern-Broadway hit surely in the queue. The music, had I been a hunchbacked and ancient type, might have been considered somewhat loud, but it ensconced me in infectious rhythms, and dulled my other senses so that I watched the world of commuters around me underwater. The water, in this case, was strictly melodic and fantastical.

Like always and everyone, I was actively pretending not to stare at everyone around me while actually, covertly taking in everything.

I subtly perused the morning crowd. Nothing but a bleak sense of doom emanated from every eye-bag and wrinkled pantsuit. Business as usual, this Tuesday morning was, with my fellow travelers holding onto the rails for balance as tightly as they held onto their last shreds of sheer will.

The car was both a museum mausoleum for dreams partnered with a decay of nausea, enough to dull even my neon pink puffer jacket.

For the sake of color, I deemed it necessary to look away, going to pull out my phone and scroll through one of the eight morning newsletters I signed up for because I thought that's the type of content fully functioning adults are supposed to consume.

But halfway through reaching my hand in my. pocket, a thread on the car's fabric caught my sight like it would on a splintering piece of wood. I blinked a few times, rubbed my eyes on my jacket cuff. Looked again but, yes, in a middle row, an elderly woman, clad in a lush floral overcoat, sat snapping her fingers.

She had no music in her ears. I turned down my headphones momentarily. Nope, no music coming out of a speaker. Everything about her was still, and yet, she kept a beat.

A beat, I noted, perplexed, that matched the exact same tune I had in my head when I had woken up that morning. The one that I had lined up in my playlist.

Odd.

I shook my head. Odd, yet, not unordinary.

In fact, you find out pretty quickly that oddities were ordinary on any metropolitan public transportation. Creatures inhaled five-dollar barbecue wings next to sleeping street performers, or to women in big sunglasses on the phone breaking up with their casual fling for all to hear. Nothing, not even cleaning food out of your hair or telling your kids that grandpa was kicked out church, was off-limits or cause for a second glance. If you did decide something was just off-beat enough that you dared one of those glances, rest assured, all would note you as a novice among the ranks with a knowing and, sometimes pitiful, brow.

In this case, songs sticking in my head were the base level of each day of my existence, so someone snapping along seemed, at some point, inevitable.

So I paid no heed.

Or, at least, I didn’t pay any heed at first.

But the funny thing is, the more I tried not to pay attention, the more it seemed everyone else around me couldn’t seem to do anything but. In fact, it was like a glow flickered down the car and into the eyes of every other commuter. An unfurling sheet. Commuters’ eyes that were just a moment ago adamantly vacant in practice, lit up.

Not every business or jog-suit traveler displayed obvious interest, but if you paid enough attention (which, like I mentioned, I always pretended not to do) you’d notice a slight zing that sent subtle electricity into everyone’s spines.

What happened next, as a result, I admit, was nothing short of impossible.

The world around me melted.

Rather, the universe folded in around the mother-goose’s wrinkled fingers, her forearm swinging side-to-side.

Then, the sound percolated to my left, towards a business tycoon-wannabe who looked barely past pubescence. He joined in with a tap, tap, tap of his fake designer shoe. Everyone swirled their heads from the snaps to his taps, and the two together formed a beat that radiated around the box car. Right into the weary threads of our souls.

 A hummingbird’s call on full blast. A bass setting turned all the way up.

A countdown.

Two women with pencil skirts, Hoka sneakers, and dark circles under their mascara-put-on-in-the-dark eyes meandered absent-mindedly to either side of Mr. Tycoon-Foot-Tapper, not even realizing as they began a unified hand-swaying routine. They just did it, as natural as leaves in the air on a windy day. My eyes widened at the sight.

Simple and smooth, a dance began. A counting-in.

And when my headphones swept into a chorus, the Heavens rained down.

In a comic-like combustion, the car transformed. Gone were the business suits and worn leather. The frayed hair and pungent smell of weed. In their place were bold patterns of eighties extravagance, golden sheens on shimmering skins, and a universal sound. A whole melodic megillah.

Commuters leapt from their seats, using the car’s poles as a conduit for soaring in the air in time with the orchestrated tune that now pulsating through the ground, the walls, the skies. Laughter bellowed from every corner and rom my gut. I was a child seeing a on Christmas Eve star shimmer as Santa's sleigh might–bursting with wonderment—as the snapping old-woman spun out to the center of the walkway. She shimmied her shoulders in a fiery grace before lifting her hands and facing upward to a sea of dancers fanning out around her. They used purses and books and umbrellas as props for an archway.

Briefcases were tossed around between sashays. A middle-schooler who I had seen in all black was now in a top hat doing back flips down the aisle. Everyone cheered and followed suit with their own favorite moves.

Dress shoes dissolved into tap shoes. Glitter sprinkled the floor and a limberness oozed in every body, in the solos and romantic dips between partners who, before, only braved brief glances at each other from across the car.

Glorious and bright, epic and seething with effortless fun, the 8:15 was an oasis of breathing color. From what I could see, a buoyant jazz-age all the way from the first subway car to the last.

Light pink smoke filtered in the air, everyone’s hearts jumping higher than their legs.

There was freedom and citrus, big hair and bold eye shadow alongside caps and suspenders. Was it night or day? Didn’t matter. What mattered was only the trumpets’ blare, or the engineers turned salsa dancers, and every personified confetti moment in between.

I was the only stillness in an otherwise choreographed, cinematic, romantic, magical, ethereal, liberating, time-bending combustion of a Broadway-meets-Hollywood extravaganza.

As a morning commuter, though I believed in the practice of ignoring the unordinary, I was completely inclined to make an exception when the unordinary transcended into that of the absolute extraordinary.

(For reference, "extraordinary": impossible to perfectly encapsulate, but much like the feeling when a theater’s lights dim and the orchestra first caresses its strings–the warmest type of something becoming.)

In a dream coat technicolor morning like the one I was suddenly swept up in, I felt that extraordinary taking effect. I threw my head back and laughed, clapping to the world’s infectious rhythm.

–Beep.

The subway sounded, signifying its arrival at the next stop.

A tranquilizer into the blood.

Around me, a great retraction, cracking my heart along its reversal route. The glitter was gone, so were the top hats.

With that damning, jolting beep, the world sunk back into itself.

There were no romantic spins, or eighties-esque lavishness. The commuters once again donned their vacant eyes as they unspooled back to where they sat, stood, checked the news on their phones.

Reality.

My throat closed at the sight of the swirling lovers back at opposite ends of the car, the lanky 5 '10 man merely peeking through the golden wires of his glasses at the curly-haired paralegal with boombox-level headphones.

Reality.

The businessmen rolled back their shoulders and tightened their stained ties, forgetting moments before they had perfected the art of the triple pirouette.

The salsa-swaying engineers squinted at their industrial-sized phones with wide stances in too-tight khakis, computing data from their emails.

The hand-swaying pencil skirt, Hoka sneakers and mascara-in-the-dark women once again tried to look as menacing as possible, in case any man deemed himself entitled enough to make a crude remark.

Reality. Reality. Reality.

All of them balloons deflating back into the 8:15’s fluorescent silence.

It was suddenly much harder to breathe.

With a swoosh, the subway cars slid open. Everyone shuffled out, unaware of any magic still snaking between them, of the song that had just adorned them in color and excavated their child-like joy. All I wanted was to shake each and every one of them, wake them up with a scream. Don’t you remember the music?? Don't you see what we all could be?

Nevertheless, one by one, the performers left.

Leaving me to remain in silence.

It was a suffocating thing, being in the remnants of a vacuum. The deafening stillness after a judge’s condemning gavel.

Here I was, ripped from a world of opulent imagination and thrust mercilessly into one where no one spoke. Or laughed. Or danced. Or felt the overarching power of belief–not as the workday loomed so close.

Where there was light, there was now lead. It sept into my bones. Maybe it was just me, but even my neon jacket looked newly worn out.

My grip on the pole tightened. Maybe this was all a sort-of twisted Houdini trick, and this stale mundane morning was the fantasy, and the musical world in my head was what was actually real and would any second once again reveal itself with a playful gotcha!

Even as I thought it, I sighed in surrender. I knew the greatest magic trick of all was not the train’s usual morning route, or the perfectly normal, non-magical way we all behaved on it. No, the greatest magic trick of all was the one I wove. It was the length my mind went to in avoidance of a bleak day ahead.

–As that immobilizing realization rooted me down, took hold and cemented me in defeat, a shifting movement caught in the corner of my eye.

Odd.

I could have sworn I was the only one left in the car.

Yet there, in the middle of the car, sat an elderly woman. A mother goose meets Macy's department store type of woman.

I blinked. Looked again. There she remained, her hands atop the purse in her lap.

She gazed out the window. Wise lines curved around her face, and CVS red-lipstick painted her soft-smiling lips.

She stayed. I thought, over and over. In the washed-up wake of my imagination-spiral she not only stayed, I realized, but hummed peacefully to herself.

She hummed.

A jolt of electricity zinged through the floorboards from her to me. I shot up a little straighter.

A song beginning.

Not unordinary.

But absolutely, unquestionably, instantaneously extraordinary.

And as real as anything I’d ever known.

The train lurched–leaving the station and continuing onward. Warm morning light streamed in.

Inhaling deeply, I noticed the blur of lights and buildings we whizzed by. I noted how the morning sun made the passing scenes look less like a cityscape and more like one big pastel painting. As I did, I couldn't help but smile–and quietly hum along with my companion.