It took me a while to realize it, but there’s no substantive difference between my commutes to and from work. Roughly the same number of people at each station, roughly the same chance of subway catastrophes, and the dour half-awake expressions of pre- and mid-coffee morning travelers are difficult to distinguish from the exhausted and drained slouches of the evening passengers. The evidence of ego seems as crushed by semi-consciousness as it is by a fully realized work day.
The slight, cosmetic differences are seasonal. The end of day subway exodus in the summer is the moment the pace of the day finally slows. In the winter, its cold and dark, so this doesn’t happen until people get to their homes and bars. The environmental oppression is roughly equal between seasons; the exhaustion caused by hurrying through the cold creates the same physical muting as the in-tunnel summer heat that simply robs you of the ability to move.
My exit point in Brooklyn involves crossing a street with a four-minute long light. Most of the time, we all cluster at the corner and peer down the streets, hoping for the rare break in traffic during the endless Don’t Walk light. We look past each other in much the way we walked past each other ten hours earlier, when we weren’t ready to communicate, now not bothering because we have nothing left to say.