...thunk-tha-thunk-tha-thunk-tha-THUNK-THA-THUNK-THA-thunk-thunk-tha-thunk...

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Dear Stranger,

For you are still a stranger, despite all my most poetic assumptions, and I cannot deny that fact... but in any case...
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...dim dark tunnels that stretch out, out, sprawling in a chaotic mass beneath the city, dim fluorescent lights shining on dimmer pale faces, that whisper past in brief yet blinding flashes through the nocturnal air
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...in any case, I must repeat myself, (for emphasis).

Dear Stranger,

I, like many others, take the subway train to work every day, despite my longtime childhood claustrophobia. I have learned to, as they say, deal with it, and endure the stifling air of the tunnels. But enough about that. I meant to write to you, for you, and I intend to do just that.
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...dawn never comes down here, daylight never shines for it is underground, far underground, and the streaming masses go down down down. Everyday, all day, in a neon city that never sleeps despite the obvious and eternal night.

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I may seem to make many assumptions about you that are incorrect, and I apologize for any discrepancies. But I have seen you every day I have gone to and from work, and I feel obligated to, at least once, tell you what you mean to me, an ordinary person.

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...and there are the subterranean dwellers, with their glistening eyes opening only to further shadows, grasping bird-bone light hands passing over tiles in search of change, they are different from the dulled daytime spirits from above.

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It should tell you something about yourself that I am only telling this to you – not any of the other so-called friends that I am familiar with. And it should tell you something about me that I feel, in this lonely Earth, the closest to someone with whom I have never, up till this moment, exchanged a word.

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and the drippings and the scrapings and the murmurings of the submerged nation flow over and under and ooze like a sluggish underground stream. And then suddenly, one bright sound, one clearer and purer than all the rest, even purer than the muted ones from above -


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I have a boring job, and the transit – well. You know. But every day I have passed you, and you are the reason I am still here...

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Here -

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I have heard you every morning and evening. I am not skilled with words, and besides, they would not do justice to you. But I must let you know that your music is much better than any other I have heard.

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Here – a new sort of dawn. Faint and echoing and rebounding, but strengthening and filling out as it grows nearer. A beacon, a beautiful soulful voice that dissolves through the dark air, it spreads itself in a glimmering veil that ensnares every fluttering creature. The music brightens and clears everything around it of the clinging grimy city dust, it soothes the wounds in hardened and battered people, and... in one more.

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I never gave you change, however. In fact, it was a good long while before I even realized that I valued your music. At some unmentioned point, I was startled to realize that I was comparing what I'd heard down there with everything else, and finding everything else sadly lacking. And at some unmentioned point, my commute became the highlight of my day.

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...because nothing can match the sensation of shining music that slides gently into your mind and your skin and your eyes like a long-forgotten lullaby, which you find yourself humming in its airless birthplace and in your gray gray cubicle with the gray gray walls and the gray gray future stretching unbidden and foreboding in front of you, nothing that gives you that same faint glow when you lie sleepless at night, staring up at the gray gray ceiling...

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And so I decided that, upon leaving, I would repay you for all you have done for me, at least as best as I can. I would repay you for freeing me from my claustrophobic cage that, despite all my childhood efforts, had entrapped me. I would repay you so that you, too, could escape.

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...and yet would the music sound the same, up there? ...or was there something glorious in the soot of the place that gave the music its soul? But it doesn't matter down here, where everything reverses slowly and backs away from reality into the toneless hum of the past and future, backs away into waiting and hours and days like the rhythmical and meaningless temp of endless work and papers that do not matter, nothing matters but the music here....

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Apropos of nothing – it always seemed to me that though, strictly speaking, you are the one searching for charity, it is in fact the opposite – we are all greatly in debt to you....

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...here, below the insomniac and uneasy city

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Although, on second thought, use the money for whatever you want. But I am moving. I'm quitting my job here (it does pay well, but at this point...) Ah, it feels so fine to know, to write that down somewhere, to tell someone! How pretty that sentence looks! I can't tell anyone but you, no one else will understand, and I'm sure my so-called friends that I mentioned earlier will disapprove of my behavior. My one regret is that I may not hear you ever again – so please, if you may, use the money to get yourself out there.

Enclosed you will find $1000.

Thank you,

A stranger

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...when the music fades, even though the tunnels never sleep, they do begin to drowse, when somebody stands and leaves to find the fresh night air where only they exist, above, taking small sparking silver and copper coins, leaving the subterranean to its more permanent dwellers. And the lights dim and flutter, and the sounds grow dull again, and the music's vibrations are the only thing keeping the tunnels from falling away into slumber.

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...thunk-tha-thunk-tha-thunk-tha-THUNK-THA-THUNK-THA-thunk-thunk-tha-thunk...