I stare down the long dark tunnel trailing away from me, searching for the two pinpricks of light that would indicate the train's arrival. Standing on the platform, watching the express pass by me and watching the frozen faces of passengers on their commute home, my stomach became soft, dropping like an empty sack to the base of my abdomen and resting there. The city I live in is a place where you catch these kinds of snapshots every day - the thin black man on the subway scowling into his newspaper or the young Asian woman frying eggs in her pink bra through the apartment window.
It's been written about before. In movies, they try to use it to symbolize human isolation - how we can be so close, but so distant from one another. Bleak urban life. The tragedy of the commons. But in some ways I find it refreshing, that we can carry on our own complex lives and others can catch snippets of them with just a casual glance. That our trajectories are shifting away from each other, even though we live in carbon-copy apartments just one floor above. I'll say it again: it's the complexity that allows us to see that we are not all part of a hive mind or a machine. Our communities must be forged, not taken for granted by being near one another.
This is the absolute opposite from the situation in collectivist cultures.
