I struggle to decide if the significance of life outweighs its brevity as I stand in a crowded subway station, shoulders hunched and surrounded by people with different lives and families and late-night insomnia prayers.

I can’t help but look at each person passing by and wonder what they’ve seen: where are they going? Where have they been? Where are they now? What is their family like? How many years did they go to school? What was their SAT score? It seems ridiculous from beneath New York City to think that an extensive vocabulary is enough to distinguish you from the millions of souls which flood the streets, but I’m still in school, and maybe that just makes me more pretentious.

Either way, every second of my own life seems wasted from the perspective of a microscope-city like this one, with buildings tall enough to make you feel like another ink letter in a never-ending book and with enough humans walking their dogs on the sidewalks to make you think humanity looks like a race of blind ants busying themselves on building a hill for something bigger to step on.

Occupation looks more like distraction than anything. I think the subway hustle to and from work is something greater than a commute; the real hurry is running from idle hands. Urbanization is a stairway to a false heaven, and if you stop moving, the competition will trample you. Those who aren’t running are actually contemplating what runs inside their heads, and that’s more dangerous than any of the sketchy people in Harlem. Stillness is addictive from the first taste, and for a solitary creature, its endurance as it pursues you is unfathomable.

As Train 3 on the red line up to Times Square breezes into this Brooklyn station, I wonder if I’m the only one here who has let her mind still her hands and has been paralyzed since from moment. In that fear, I don’t even notice that every other person shuffling through the trains has their shoulders hunched just like me.