Oh the Joys of riding the NYC subways…
After a long, tiresome day of clinicals, I parked myself on one those infected seats that make up the subway-cars hoping to have my ritual zone-out session while listening to music. Well, nothing really ever goes according to plan now, does it? Three stops away from my apartment, an old Haitian woman walked on the packed train and stood in front of me. I glanced at her and being the generous girl I am (ha), asked if she wanted my seat. I assumed she didn’t hear me so I “signaled” to- NOT touched- her, and as I’m in the middle of restating my question, she screamed and said, “Don’t touch me! Jesus is not with you!” I was about to defend myself, but honestly there was no purpose. Some battles are not worth fighting (especially with The Insane). On the flipside, just because I wasn’t going to defend myself, doesn’t mean the rest of the train can’t have my back, right? Right.
I’m not exaggerating when I say this incident caused chaos in the train. People were yelling, screaming, spitting (fine, maybe not spitting, but I hope you get my point) at this woman. They continuously said, All she wanted to do was give you her seat. She was just being nice to you! After listening to the Haitian talk, I realized the only vocab she knew was “Jesus” because she managed to reference him in every sentence--- “Jesus is not with her; she is a bad girl for touching me. Oh giiiiiiRL, Jesus hates her.” A man sitting 3 seats next to me blurted out, “I can’t take this- what has this world come to? The only thing this girl wanted to do was do a good deed by offering you her seat…Has the world gone mad? And for god’s sake she didn’t touch you!” I honestly started laughing so hard because this whole situation was quite comical to me. I literally kept on telling my new friends to ignore her because it’s simply not worth it.
As the lady walked off the subway, she made it a point to once again say how Jesus isn’t with me. As the doors closed, a woman sitting across from me felt impeded to say “Don’t listen to that old bag, Jesus is WITH you.” Quite frankly, the only thing synapsing through my head during and after this catastrophic-uproar was- who cares? Jesus and I aren’t friends; in fact, I don’t even like Him!
Oh the joy of living in NY. You’ll never have a boring day.
