Photo: Hans Bruesch

Maybe you see him standing on the platform and decide to stand next to him, even if it made more sense for you to board the train on the opposite end of the walkway. You’ve recognized each other on many mornings and you feel close because of this, and you wonder if he feels it too.

You don’t want to speak to him. but you think about where he might be from, where he goes when he ascends the escalator, and what his bedroom looks like when he leaves it in the morning. Maybe you crowd in to a rail car, and, as your bag gets caught in a closing door, a cute brunette with perpetual five o’clock shadow reaches out and pulls it free. He makes a joke or engages in small talk that hangs in the air with no place to go, so you both just smile and enjoy your manufactured innocence. Maybe as you squeeze through the semi-permeable membrane of stoic commuters you find yourself standing next to a preppy young man holding a coffee cup. You catch him staring at you and he looks away. As the crowd shifts between stops you are squeezed together, and you both reach for an empty spot on the overhead handrail. Out of necessity you face each other, a foot apart, each of you with an arm raised in leverage. He looks away, but you examine the details of his face, the knot of the tie he wears behind his v-neck sweater, the way he likes his barber to trim the hairline at the base of his neck, and the erection that seems to be forming behind his trousers. Each of these experiences ends the same way. One or both of you walk through Metro’s open doors, and you leave each other with something gained, shared, and undefined.

The Metro inspires a special sensuality. I find this particularly true in the pre-caffeinated silence of morning. It’s not the private intimacy you experience in a darkened room with your lover or the humid desire that moves through you in a thickly packed dance club. It’s a mix of those extremes, unspoken poetry made possible by quiet moments in the filled space of a fast moving train. It’s restrained desire hiding in plain sight. Focused recognition without affirmation. Perfect moments not ruined by consummation, like a painting of birds forever in flight or a photograph that reveals a universe without answering questions.

Metro sensuality doesn’t limit itself to the subtle varieties of sexual desire. It also manifests as a wordless and warm intimacy between unknown friends. This connection reveals itself in the 5:00 a.m. recognition of a migrant worker slouched and sleeping on his way to a backbone job, in the concern on the face of a single mother whose face bears her children’s names in invisible ink, and in the remembered youth of a refined older business man hiding behind a starched suit who catches you staring into his tired face as he reads “The Catcher in the Rye,” your momentarily locked eyes communicating in an instant the bittersweet recognition of decades.

Recently, the relationship between DC residents and the Metro has been strained. From recent conversations, it seems more hated than loved, by a wide margin. The system is subject to long delays and the infrastructure is crumbling, with water damage and trash making appearances that were unthinkable several years ago. Recently, a tragic crash caused by mechanical failure claimed the lives of nine people, including a train operator named Jeanice McMillan, on the job for only three months. In the days after the crash, few people would enter the first and last cars of Metro trains, as both were destroyed in the tragedy still fresh in collective memory. While public apprehension of Metro is understandable, my hope is that people will push past their anxiety and connect to what Jeanice felt every morning as she ironed her clothes in preparation for a job that her family said she dearly loved, most notably for one reason: her relationships with the people she interacted with every day on her train.

Sometimes it isn’t easy to experience the humanity waiting for us when Metro opens doors, but it’s always there if we want it. I find that music helps coax the language from its ineffable nature, and I personally recommend anything by Miles Davis, particularly the alternate take of Sketches of Spain, from the Kind of Blue album. During your morning commute, before swiping your SmarTrip to catch that first train and not after joining the throng of forlorn cubicle workers who ascend escalators through an invisible membrane that welcomes the birth of daily reality, consider taking time to bear witness to Metro sensuality.