The Privacy of the Commute

the mid-month post

Have you ever thought about the fact that no one knows what goes on during your commute but you? You are pretty much entirely untethered from all your connections and responsibilities. As long as you get to work on time, no one cares what you do on your way there. Where are you? What are you doing? What are you thinking about? No one can know, and no one will ever even notice that they don’t know.

Once, decades back, my husband happened to mention that he’d been buying a physical newspaper from one of those metal boxes on the street and reading it on the bus each morning. He’d been doing it for years and I’d had no idea.¹

You might be listening to an audiobook. It might be a romance novel. You might suddenly arrive at an unexpectedly spicy sex scene. This might happen on a crowded train. No one around you will have any idea what’s unfolding in your ears, in your mind.

I used to consistently get off my bus a stop early because I preferred the slightly more circuitous walk to my office from that stop. No one knew I did that. No one on the bus, no one I passed on the street. Not my coworkers. Not my family. Not a soul. Not until right now. You’re the first people I’ve told.

When you’re driving on the freeway at rush hour you are literally surrounded by hundreds of other people, and yet in another sense you are entirely alone. You might be singing along to Bon Jovi at the top of your lungs and the people in the cars around you haven’t got a clue. One of them might see you mouth moving, but as far as they know you could be on the phone. And it doesn’t matter the least bit to them what you’re doing anyway.

There are relatively few places in this world where we have this sort of privacy and freedom, actually. But no one says so. No one even notices. You’re never going to hear anyone talk about how wild and free they feel on their way to work. Of course not, they’re on their way to work. But there is the glimmer of the fantastic hiding in there.

1. This also raises a truth about marriage—how you can be so profoundly intimate with someone, and yet they retain their own enigmatic separate personhood in a delightful way.