Mind the Gap

Speaking of trains, it's nothing short of miraculous that I have never fallen or been pushed into the train track gap at South Station for the Red Line. It's something I'm acutely aware of each and every day, as the work day finally ends and I'm up for the last hurdle of just getting myself home safely. Every single afternoon, I come down to the tracks and position myself in such a way that I can get to the train doors quickly, but not too close so that an overcrowded platform, or someone just misjudging the space and plowing into me, doesn't send me careening onto the tracks. I also make sure that if I were to faint or something, I'd have enough space around me in any direction in order to not fall head first into the ditch before an oncoming train.

Am I crazy to think about this every day? Probably. Nothing has ever happened to me, even though I did once know someone who assisted in pulling a stranger up off from the tracks as a train approached, but I'd been watching my surroundings long before that incident. And I have seen many people faint on the train in my almost two decades of commuting. But I feel like I'm always one of those people who is very conscious of the space I take up, and where I am in the world, when so many people are just...not. That's just what I do.

And I guess I don't take that safety I try to inoculate myself with for granted.