The Eight-Thirty-Five Subway: Common App Prompt

Common App Prompt: Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?

I got the idea from the feedback I got from my commissioned essay.

The Eight-Thirty-Five Subway

             Eight thirty-five in the morning, the train now approaches Sadang. People with earphones in their ears, newspapers in their hands, backpacks on their shoulders struggle to the door. A crowd pours out, and another pours in. Silent but aggressive fight occurs within seats, driven by morning fatigue. I blink my eyes, trying to distract tiredness out of my sight. Sleepiness presses down my head. I crave the comfort of sitting down on the seat so much, but I persevere to stand up. Leaning near the door, against the bars, I fix my arms on the wall and focus on the shadows that linger on subway windows.

             Everyone is separated. Nobody is interested to others. Placing themselves in the world of newspapers and books and cellphones, people rather seem to be living in different dimensions. The figures of people packed in the subway look like hollow apparitions of them who are actually living in outer space. Everyone is heading somewhere, to every direction far and near from each other, to all different places. It is even mysterious that they are boxed up in this one vehicle that drives them to same direction and same stations.

             Shadows and reflections of people intersect one another. One shadow slides into the darkness of the transferring platform. A reflection from another train rests a while on the window of the train I am in. Although they do not realize how their fragments are overlapped and coexistent, people anyway pass by and pay attention to what they are interested in at the time. Even though I am playing the observer from my perspective, I am also another part of this set of momentary encounters, packed in the subway and heading together with the unknown crowd.

             I now focus the camera on my reflection on the window. As I face the darkness beyond the door, between the platforms outside, a flash of another arriving train penetrates the space between my shadow and darkness. I set the shutter speed to one tenth. The people behind the windows blur and stretch horizontally with the direction the arriving train is heading. I let myself separated but harmonize with this familiar-strange scene. I look like as if I am wandering in the sea of lost souls, trying to listen to something.

             I push my camera back inside the train. It is eight forty-three, and the train is approaching Seoul Station. Another series of silent fights take place around empty seats. The man who succeeded taking the seat looks relieved, and he let his falling eyelids close. A woman with a big backpack seems stressed, not being able to sit. Then a little story seems to bloom from this dry space of indifference.

Maybe each people as an individual play no big role in the stage people have in their own minds. Before the encounter or any events, they are only fragments scattered in various corners of the world. However, when people bump into others, as they realize each other, then some story begins between them, making spaces between their fragmented existences. (510 words)