Metropolitan is a museum for the atypically typical human dooms and destinies. This museum has one notable feature: its daily visitation does not bother you at all. For an entrance ticket, they ask a scanty cost, but  emotions and feelings will be definitely enough until the next ‘visit’. The traveling from one end of my native blue branch to the other is full of mysteries and models… Sometimes it is even possible to get acquainted with some unusual ‘museum exhibits’. No wonder that I fell in love with this subway branch because blue is my favorite color. This is a common statement, that this sea-sky color soothes and improves concentration, but on the subway, I usually concentrate on the psycho types of passengers.

Of course, it is more comfortable to sit somewhere at the end of the wagon, between the two obese ladies and keep your washy eyes  in non-fiction, but unfortunately, a free place in the wagon is even more fiction than King’s best-selling plots. It is the reason why I have to entertain myself with a fictional game “Psychologist in the Underground”. The only comfort is that I am not interested in neurobiology, so I will not have to learn the thoughts of passengers by the deductive method but by the operative one, or more precisely, by the method of surgery.

My mother once told me that in my childhood I used to have a strange amusement: I tried to guess what diseases a person had, focusing only on external factors. I analyzed skin color, scars or abnormal pigmentation, gait, and even strangers’ breathing rates. After this observation, I advanced my mother`s well-founded assumptions about the diagnosis. Of course, she did not approve of this kind of my curiosity, but she knew that the third part of my life spending in hospital walls had to leave a mark on my mind.

I am speaking about it in order to point out that I have been already bored of analyzing the flaws of human bodies, and I have stopped on a separate part of it — the head, or better to say on the box with noodles and gray fluid inside it. Scientists claim that it generates our thoughts, actions, and social behavior.

The atmosphere of the subway is peculiar. You are acutely aware of it even against your own will. Knocking rails, the noise of children, the scent of everyday life and the feeling of loneliness, indifference, nonchalance…

It seems that all these underground “exhibits” are united by a single, common fatum — apathy. Besides that, each passenger has his own portrait, and apathy is only one of its basic colors. This portrait in my head I begin to draw from their eyes. For example, this gentleman in a leather jacket to the left of the entrance is confident, but somewhat sad. The girl, who is immersed in an apple smartphone, is focused and excited. My favorite “museum exhibits” are children, because they are the most sincere, unrepentant and light-hearted passengers. Their eyes always burn passionately, happily, cheerfully…

I wonder, when does that harsh moment of despair come, because of which people blame their eyes? For some of the passengers, this moment is visible on the surface of the posture. Their superficiality is a result of repeated vile treason. Others, in turn, have flushed eyes, sharply furrowed eyebrows, and wrinkled foreheads because of endless experience excess.

Another notable feature of the despicable “exhibits” of this realistic museum is the labored, weary hands that those passengers hide in their wide pockets with undisguised shame…

Among thousands of “exhibits” just only one emotion is common. Unfortunately, the emotions of doom, fear, and despair prevail among the “exhibits” of our metro. If it continues in the same way, the subway will become not a familiar mode of transport, but a rooted lifestyle.

Wow, the same voice-over, “Vasylkivska Station. The train does not go any further. Passengers, please clear the carriages.”

February 20, 2020