Subway Dream

We're sitting on the train, and he tells me a story about his dream:

I was on the D, passing from Manhattan to Brooklyn at dusk across the bridge, this strange experience of emerging from darkness into a falling, glancing light. It was so vivid, I saw the water tower reshaped in glass, the worked stone cornices, the last floes of ice in the river. There was a man standing beside the door with a sharpie in his hand, writing furiously on the door. I stood up at Atlantic to look at what he'd written and found that everything had been written in the black space above the warning to not lean on the doors. Someone jostled me, and I found myself awake.

When I woke, he said, I wondered why the dream had been so vivid, why it had finished with someone writing. Maybe it's a sort of metaphor for our lives here, traced out over and over but only barely legible.

Maybe, I allowed, but look, it's our stop.