Red lights at dusk

Tonight as I stepped off the subway at my stop, I looked out at the road that runs on either side of the train station and was quite suddenly blue. The subway station is in a strange spot anyway, the tracks slightly elevated and running directly in the center of the highway. You get to it through a tunnel that runs beneath the eternal traffic.  Sometimes in the morning I stare out the train window and see snapshots: men in pick-up trucks smoking cigarettes with the window cracked, plain women in SUVs talking on cell phones. Sometimes, when the traffic is moving, it seems the cars are racing the trains, aggressively creeping south to the city in a brutal rush to sit and feel their own worth. But not tonight. Tonight i stepped off the train and it was grey and nearly dark as it always is these days. Out of sheer habit I looked to my right, to the side of the road that goes north past billboards and liquor stores, schools now barren of children, gas stations. That's the way I go, to the suburbs, back home. Tonight out there in the coming darkness there was nothing but cars, a cacophony of matching red lights packed in three grey lanes like sardines in a tin can, neat rows, all going the same way, stopped dead. I had my headphones on. I was listening to The Doors' Hyacinth House. "Why did you throw the Jack of Hearts away? It was the only card in the deck that I had left to play." I stuck one hand in my jacket pocket then fell in line with the swollen crowd that emptied out of the train cars. A swarm, like bees, funneling toward the tan marble stairs that lead down, out. The next to the last step at the bottom has a huge chunk missing and is jagged and uneven . Last week I stepped there unknowingly and like a drunk, lurched forward and caught myself just before i fell down in a thick crowd. I made believe it had never happened, straightening myself and walked on.Cool, as if anyone cared. Tonight as I descended I was thinking about a scene from the movie Revolutionary Road where Leonardo DiCaprio is getting off a train in New York in the morning and he's surrounded by thousands of men and they all look just like him: dark suits and thin ties with fedora hats and newspapers neatly folded under their arms. It's that sameness that makes me weary sometimes, the uniformity, the hurried rush to something none of us can really identify with any candor. On days like these I can  feel the monotony between my fingers. It's like I'm watching myself watching the eyes of a crowd at a tennis match, back and forth, back and forth, polite applause, then back and forth again. Today I was aware of the broken step near the bottom of the stairs and stepped around it. Now that I am aware of it, I will not risk the fall. I stayed tight with the crowd. In front of me was a heavy-set middle-aged woman wearing a long jean skirt. She walked slowly, rocking from leg to leg, her hips dipping with each agonizingly slow step. At the bottom of the skirt she wore red socks. 

I walked the three flights up to my car, closed the door and lit a cigarette. I pulled out of the parking garage and onto the highway, finding an opening in the long, long line of red lights stopped in the autumn dusk.