Reminders of the 6 Train

This morning as I was driving to Raleigh for work the song “Walk the Line” by Jadu Heart came on (listen here, please).

My music this morning made me reflect on the summer I spent living in the Lower East Side (probably, if I had to guess, because I was listening to my playlist titled “LES” which was made specifically for those few months). In my apartment on Forsyth Street, that playlist became the soundtrack to a very distinct chapter of my life. It’s what I would listen to when I descended the escalator to the Grand Street Trader Joe’s, when I would walk up to the East Village and watched as the laundromats’ neon “open” signs turn to hole in the wall restaurants only someone as cool as your best friend’s older sister would recognize. “LES” was as ritualistic as my actions themselves, though one stands out to me the most.

Every day I would walk down six flights of stairs that smelled vaguely yet consistently of Spanish cooking and had no air conditioning. Out two sets of glass doors across from Sara D. Roosevelt Park and a right past the occupied plastic chair outside of the barber. Down Spring, past the open doors of Spring Lounge and The Wren and all the dive bars that line the street and were never meant to be seen in daylight. A left down the stairs and through the turnstile to the platform of the 6 train.

In Goodbye to All That, Joan Didion says in the context of New York that it’s easy to see the beginning of things and harder to see the ends. “I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my necks constrict, when New York began for me… the warm air of mildew and some instinct that informed me that it would never quite be the same again.” For me, New York began on the platform of the 6 train on Spring Street as LES played through my headphones.

How strange, to accredit a dirty train platform in a neighborhood I barley lived in as a catalyst for personal growth. It’s so interesting, the associations we make between objects and places and music and smells to a specific time in our lives. East of Eden will always be the book I read in periods of waiting that summer – on commutes and at small outdoor round marble tables meant for two. The red and rickety chairs of Dimes Square in the hour between sunset and darkness, the matchbook collection that would grow like a plant on my bedroom windowsill. As these memories latch themselves to physical objects, I begin to resonate more with Joan Didion’s words.

The memories attached to these objects and places inform me that it – whatever it may be – will never quite be the same again. That summer I watched vague ideas of New York and life after college come to life in the form of lived experience. It was as if the life I had written out for myself leapt off the page and stared back at me, in the reflection of passing windows of the 6 train on Spring Street.