I subway sincerity: punking the days into identity, crosshatching the city. I was made from this motion, so rough. My façade took time: this wry, this shit-eating. One day I jumped into the tracks for kicks and felt panic and wonder at how to get back on top of something I couldn’t see over. As I angled myself onto the platform I transferred from defacing myself as a point of pride to become all utility, layered with my past strongly adhered and poorly hidden under my enamel exterior. Years of movement carve these tunnels into something more textured than the cuts of drills and claws. I can’t hide what I can’t help—the shameful sticker of my face struck red.

I map boroughs with my body, straight and narrow: breast blinking directional, belly button pothole, strong desire line to a tunnel designed for mass transience. I spend frequent nights at an apartment I don’t know the address of. I landmark cracks and crevices shaped by habit, looked for signs of myself. The bar patio where I caused a scene, the parking lot where I bruised my hip falling off my bike in the rain. One wrong turn and I don’t know the neighborhood. I wind a way along rails, the tunnel of me empty, the muscle of my memory atrophied. Every impression decays eventually.

I erect the underground: gaping entries mouthing open. It took a generation for me to smile. First I tunnel in through the face, create a cavity deep enough that I travel from my small island to a longer island. Then I dig into my eye sockets to see how safety looks like strangers. Then I don’t get to know anyone in this new place, only how to please myself in the presence of what I don’t know. Let myself be located by the shape of details, a picnic table that my back knows the splinters of, the absent banister of a staircase I climb to bed, the dark breadth of the river whose wetness becomes my personal sea, swollen with the satisfaction of all the arms I rail into and out of that carve this idiot grin on my forgetful face. All excavated, I wrap my mouth wider than I knew it could go. At this unlikely depth everything is a mirror and I’m so much younger than I appear.

I station scattershot: strata myself again and again at this weigh station, a layering of moments. I spent so long making the same motion I lost the heat map of home. I doubt my sense of direction, check overlooked signage, grip my purse tight and x-ray my way across the subterranean city, scanning for specifics. It’s been a long time but I know the way from here. Here’s where I came everyday twice a day for a year. Here’s where I left friends and ran into family. Here I pangaea and 360. I’m bird’s eye and foundation at this junction where I orient myself to every coordinate, all connected.

I beam support: structuring space, sound and reliant. Everyone here is a speech bubble and I am the blurb of a witness, my open face open to interpretation. The story I tell is static. I grew up in a city so big I never knew the streets as well as I knew the stops. I spent twenty-three years perfecting my pose, the commuter conducting underground. I placed emphasis carefully and can see the indent my feet made standing my ground for so long. Platforms are anonymous pressured into personal and time is a transfusion of the random millions migrating against me. I’ve been in transit without departing or returning—dingleberried to the edge of others’ motion. It’s the sound bite of me, the boom and squeal, that carries these massive islands.