Out of work late. Nothing unusual; it doesn’t even hurt. You are fond of leaving work long after dark, as you prefer overexertion to sluggishness. You take the red line East with a bag of corn chips in your lap. Nothing unusual. Lately. Lovely. Luckily You. You have a day’s worth of ambient noise stuck in your head, like a prayer, like a song. You wonder why the train is so empty because it couldn’t be so very, very late, could it?
Shift. If it wasn’t that damn freezing drizzle again. Made a wreck of you, made a wreck of the streets. You pitied the parts of infrastructure that were disrupted by circumstances such as climate. Perhaps the train would go flying off the tracks. Perhaps. A tunnel, suddenly; the train went underground. You sigh with relief.
(You hadn’t anticipated the bad nerves.)
For you’d always imagined that with the passing of time, a certain complacency – maybe even a tendency to embrace any old fate – would set in. But like your contemporaries, you were starting to see how aging might well be a misfortune. Which might explain (or at least partially account for) your discontent with the budding, cultural activities of that metropolis. But it didn’t make you sour. You at least enjoyed a good explanation.