I started keeping the notebook by accident. A woman across the aisle said something so specific — "he told me the soup was a metaphor and I have never trusted him since" — that I wrote it down on the back of a receipt before I'd decided it was worth keeping.

Six months later I have forty pages of these. Most are useless. A few, read back in order, start to sound like a very long play with no single author and no idea it's being staged.

the regulars

There's a man who narrates his own commute out loud, every morning, in the register of a nature documentary. "And here we see the doors, closing against all reason." I have never seen his face — only heard the voice, three cars down, moving through the same stops at the same hour, a fixed point in an otherwise unrepeatable ride.^[1]

There's the argument that seems to happen on a loop between two people who may or may not be the same two people each time — about a lease, a name on a lease, whether the lease matters if no one signed it.

the fragments

Most entries in the notebook are a single line, unrepeatable because I never learned the rest of the sentence:

"— and that's the third time this year the dog has technically been a co-signer."

"No, I said the other uncle. The one who believes in the moon landing."

I don't know what surrounds these. I like that I don't.

a small defense of eavesdropping

There's a temptation to call this project voyeuristic, and it probably is, a little. But the subway is one of the last rooms in the city where strangers narrate their lives out loud to no one in particular, confident enough in the anonymity of the car to say the true, strange, specific thing.^[2] I'm not recording anyone. I'm just the only person taking notes.