05.08.16, Paris, France
Not everything in the city of Paris was beautiful and historic. The Parisian Metro was a gritty, dark place beneath the bright surface of the city. It was dank, it smelled of rot, and it was dim. Angry writing was scrawled in black and red on the tiled and concrete walls, cries for peace, war, death, freedom. The damp concrete floor was littered with cigarettes and dissolving garbage, melding together in spilled coffee and polluted water. The tunnels seemed to stretch forever, a maze beneath the city that connected everything in the urban wheel and beyond. The metro stops themselves were concrete, occasionally with benches for those waiting but more often than not sparse to allow as many people on the platform as possible. There was something crushing about the metro; the low ceilings, the rushing, pushing people, the breezes that only came with the swift passing of the train, like a white and silver snake that blew past the milling creatures that waited to crawl into their nimble bodies that pierced the earth at lightning speeds. Occasionally, two of these machines would pass each other, braking the pitch black of the tunnels to show the people rushing past in the opposite train, their faces blank and motionless in the brief seconds that the lights through transparent glass and damp earth could render them visible, shocking and almost disturbing how brief and surreal the passing was. The insides of the tubes themselves were stark, with seats and interlocking poles to hold onto and prevent the force of the movements in the deep earth to send people toppling. Sometimes, the carriages were empty; otherworldly in the fact that they were deserted and lonely. Sometimes, they were packed so full of people that it was impossible to even see the floor or the seats, and the rods of metal were completely eclipse my grabbing hands attached to bodies desperate to stay upright against the force of the accelerations and decelerations of the swift trains. The trains themselves, deep in the earth, made the veil feel thin. It was as if, in the urban rush, a new sort of superstition, as powerful as those of old, was being created.
