This morning, a polite young man let me into a packed R train first, even though there was a chance he wasn’t going to fit in after me. I flattened myself as much as I could to allow him in, too, and as he tried to squeeze between the doors at the last minute, the sleeve of his leather jacket got caught. I stared at the fabric, pressed into the crack between the doors so tightly he couldn’t pull it out, and remembered a time when the same thing happened to me.
I was wearing a plaid cape and flew into the 4 train, superhero style, in the last seconds before the doors closed. One side of the cape got caught in the doors, and in the moments before I knew the train would begin to move, I had all of these terrifying daymares about what might happen as we moved through the tunnel:
