A Ghost & Gone for Good (or Multi-faceted Subterranialism)

Sitting beneath the hum of a thousand watts of fake and fluorescent oil and concrete-scented light, I long for the sweet breath of the Metro winds, reminding me of the world I left above me: a world filled with hope and dreams and movement. Not the silent sheltered graveyard that this tunneled tomb is to me. A carriage comes with screeching grating wheels and a hundred placid faces staring out, each visage torn by the silent hopelessness that this tomb of motion builds within us all. I watch as the elephant-sized steel caterpillar stops and gapes its sideways maw at me, welcoming me to its compartmentalizing hell; laughing with its pre-recorded voice of instructions, like a robot that cannot feel. I step into the guts of the beast and lose my soul with all the other wearied travelers, as I await the sweet release that its closing jaws had promised me. But deep within its belly now, I find that no release will come to me. Instead, there are only new and older smells, more human and grotesque in their complexities. I scoff at the idea that I could have once considered this new world with all its perplexities and all its swallowed lives as anything close to better than the frightened and yet docile life I left behind. I shudder as I discover that my kindness and my thoughtful nature and my conscientious ideals that encourage progress in a human life all mean nothing here. My skin grows pale as I feel the silence of the void, enticing me to become one of these lost souls. I clam up, deep within myself, becoming silent in my heart, as the thought approaches me in fear and a kind of frolicking cold mayhem, that perhaps I've always been one of these pale zombies: dead wanderers in a world of steely grey, enticing others toward the void. But just as those thoughts emerge, just as the light within the tunnel of my mind grows dim to the point of patent blindness, I hear the robot voice again: "Hollywood & Vine," it says, as I stumble through its maw, returning to the thousand watts of fake fluorescent air without that is still somehow within. I feel the solidity of the concrete and immovable ground beneath my feet and wonder, had I stayed another minute there, alone within the belly of that beast, would I have found myself turned to one of those lost souls: a ghost and gone for good?