The Loneliness of the Subway Nap

For several years, I lived a few blocks from Kings County Hospital, in Brooklyn. My morning commute was full of shift-tired nurses and bleary-eyed, freshly bandaged patients who’d spent the night waiting in a crowded emergency room. Doctors and nurses, still in their scrubs, would silently shuffle into the station, mechanically slump into their seats, and almost immediately nod off.

On the subway, you can often tell who lives in New York and who doesn’t by how casually they sit and with what degree of paranoia they clutch their belongings. Subway nappers are clearly at home: their commute is worn so deeply into them that, typically, their bodies jerk awake before they miss their stops; they seem to sense, somewhere within their half-sleep, when they should start readying themselves to exit the train. There is no romance or performance to these everyday moments, but there is a very real intimacy. In a place as daunting and enormous as New York, it is striking, and even a little comforting, that a city can be within a body this way.

Last month, Kristen Radtke considered the loneliness of the parking-lot phone call.