a FAVORITE

Jam-packed train.  Head-to-head. Nose-to-nose. 

Just existing in little invisible boxes, never touching.  Eye contact rigorously avoided.  We all fear the Missed Connections serenade, no? 

Some women click-click-click on their blackberries, feverish thoughts dazzling their 2" screen. Others (the braver, more brazen ones, I suppose), stare cockeyed into a compact mirror - lips slightly ajar, mascara wand keen on the lashes.  Careful, now.  How do they make it look so glorious?   And the men - the beautiful men in their cinched trench coats -  graze the Wall Street Journal.  Oh, how the Dow dips, dips and dips.  Others stare, catatonic, before the space between them and those standing - or sitting - or squatting - or slouching - or pretending to ignore the very pregnant woman standing just inches away from their seat.  It's always a bit of a waltz.  But eerie.  Silent.  

Still: there are the special ones - those folks bursting just beneath the skin, those wanting nothing more than to watch the surrounding crowd fade away, so that the imprisoned can dance.  Eyes closed, their feet secretly tap.tap.tap.  The head bobs.  Ever so slightly.  Ever so gently.  Ever so quietly.  Cautiously, in secret.  Oh! Oh! Oh! 

And they're spinning - but only in a world that exists elsewhere.  That place where imagination and dream lapse into wanderlust.  The province of protean revery.  Pole swinging.  Jumping into a Broadway whirlygig manifesto.  High kicks.  Pirouettes.  Deep dips.  Soul-stretching bliss.  Unseen.  Unknown.  Unacknowledged.    

Then, sooner than one would expect, the train waddles into the next station.  Doors lurch open, and thousands of groggy-eyed commuters stuff their print-things and devices and what-nots into covert pockets.  

And we continue through this unrehearsed choreography - this daily masquerade that is too familiar to savor or even digest.