the last metrocard.
unacknowledged little endings.
We rarely know when something is truly over.
The day you spent outside, sun touching skin as you sit on a blanket, laughing with friends, doesn’t even register as you toss the pair of shorts you were wearing into a bag destined for either a second-hand store or the landfill. A meal with your family at a restaurant, a place that felt as familiar as your own kitchen, each of you groaning about how you couldn’t possibly eat another bite. And now you won’t, because the restaurant abruptly closed the next week. Walking under a tree for years, for decades, barely even registering it until one day, a stump. A shadeless stretch of sidewalk.
So many unacknowledged little endings.
Of course, knowing when something is over is its own type of quiet loss. Minutes tick by before the final school bell, a recognition of moving forward, of moving on - even if you’re not quite ready - quickly overshadowed by the uncertainty and anticipation of what comes next. Closing the door of an empty apartment, fingers gliding down a bannister you will never touch again. Final words of love delivered bedside, the pain of saying goodbye when we’re not ready.
Maybe it’s better not to know, to let the loss float by unannounced, silently leaving us.
Earlier this year, I got an email - my final MetroCard.
Nearly a decade after my first trip to New York, riding the subway or bus has never lost its appeal. Even during the times when the train is delayed, there is the annoyance in the moment, but it doesn’t take too long for my mind to wander back to the past, to days spent trapped inside the suburbs, wishing I had the freedom to roam around. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was almost twenty. Without a car or access to public transportation, I spent much of my time alone at home, dreaming about a future when I wouldn’t need to rely on friends or my mom to take me where I wanted to go.
Eight years ago, I moved to New York to start my first job after college. The first few hours of new hire orientation were a blur, but one thing stuck out: I could request a fully loaded MetroCard as a benefit, automatically taken out of my paycheck, pre-tax, and delivered straight to me. Freedom had finally arrived in the form of a small, flimsy, goldenrod rectangle straight from the nineties.
Learning how to swipe that summer was an introduction to New York’s secret rhythm. Swipe too fast and all you’ll end up getting is a pair of bruised thighs, maybe even another rushed commuter slamming up behind you. Swipe too slow and you reveal yourself for what you are - an easy mark. You have to be firm. Confident, but not showy. Aside from two years in Canada, each month I would open my mailbox and find a thin envelope loaded with a MetroCard, a ritual that was both utterly benign, completely administrative, yet oddly reassuring - a regular reminder that against all odds, this little girl from Texas had made her way to New York City.
I swiped to first dates and picnics and doctor’s appointments; ran down streets and up stairs in the hopes of making train doors and buses before they pulled away. A swipe took me to Washington Square Park, where I got engaged; another swipe to Kings County Courthouse, where I finalized my divorce. It was in this way that life slowly inched forward: reaching into my wallet, swiping my MetroCard, moving about the city, unaware of how attached I had become to a magnetic strip until -
Practically speaking, I knew this transition made sense. Conceptually, the move to tap-and-pay is the next logical step in transportation technology; parts of Europe and Asia have had this for years, decades even. Switching to OMNY was a long time coming. The decision to end the MetroCard started an entire year before I even moved to New York. This was something that was always going to end. I just didn’t think I would care so much.
Phasing out the MetroCard didn’t matter until it dawned on me that it was one of the last things in my life that I regularly engaged with that wasn’t my phone. Now, instead of reaching for my wallet and slipping out my MetroCard, I can just tap. It’s simpler, but it also feels as though something small was lost. The struggle and eventual joy of figuring out how to swipe, of learning the city’s subtleties, is instead replaced by a transaction style that doesn’t feel all that different from paying for a cup of coffee or a pair of shoes.
There is a sort of quiet intentionality that went behind the design of not only the card but the vending machines as well. As the MTA was rolling out vending machines, the off-the-shelf Cubic model quickly became an issue. The original design was clunky and hard to navigate for the system’s variety of users, which range from tourists, harried commuters, and everyone in between. Just two years after its launch, the MTA hired a design firm in 1996 to reimagine how New Yorkers would buy their transit fare.
Created “for a future that never quite happened” by alumni of the human-centered design firm IDEO, the colorful vending machines drew inspiration from a design theory out of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in suburban Detroit. It was there that students, including Masamichi Udagawa, were taught “product semantics.” This represented a departure from more modernist approaches of “form follows function,” instead emphasizing “form follows meaning.” Udagawa and another IDEO alum, Sigi Moeslinger, would go on to lead the redesign of the MetroCard machines by emphasizing “expressive, often metaphorical shapes” and “fanciful sensuality.”
The final version of the MetroCard machines was both functional yet oddly pleasing to look at. Art hidden in plain sight. It has gone on to become a beloved industrial design piece, finding its way to MOMA and other art retrospectives over the years. The same could not be said for its replacement, another off-the-rack Cubic model defined by dull blue-gray tones, another entry into the monochrome future that has come to define modern design and fashion.
Of course, it’s not just how we pay for getting on a train. Life generally feels frictionless, everything reduced to a slim piece of plastic and metal.
Modern life somehow feels bleaker than ever.
Last year, Apple released an ad showing a variety of purpose-built things - a trumpet, arcade machine, paint supplies, journals - crushed into the “thinnest” iPad Pro. As if the experience of learning how to play an instrument is something we can replace with learning how to program a sound that mimics it on GarageBand. Naturally, this created a backlash, especially coming just months after the Hollywood strikes, where writers and actors pushed back against the use of AI in the entertainment industry. Rival tech companies briefly capitalized on the bad PR, Apple issued a generic statement, and the news cycle quickly moved on.
So much of contemporary experiences feel soulless, devoid of any personality or signs that a human was even involved. Emma Goldberg recently wrote about this in the New York Times, calling it the “slopification” of life. Our clothes, which are also increasingly plastic, are slop, cheaply made, and then upsold across different brands. We watch slop by way of airbrushed reality contestants or “prestige” television that masquerades as commentary without actually saying anything. We buy our salads and mushy bowls that are virtually interchangeable, so we can maximize some semblance of health while multitasking in front of a phone, computer, or TV screen (or maybe all three). Netflix now creates content specifically for “second screen” viewing.
At this point, it might not even be human but some fever dream generated from an AI prompt. Dead internet theory slowly moves from an online meme to a potential reality as people outsource everything from their dating app responses to college essays, all packaged in the name of efficiency but ultimately the latest Silicon Valley gold rush, where moving fast and breaking things now means fundamentally altering what once seemed infallible: the truth.
Being online lately feels exhausting, and not simply because of the signature headline mania and whiplash that has come to define Trump’s second administration. Each day I log on, I dread the point - a point that feels like it’s rapidly approaching - when I will see or hear something so convincingly real, only to find out later it was fake.
The last six months have felt like a fugue state.
Each time I take a look at my phone or turn to the news, I wonder what fresh hell awaits me. As of this week, that list includes the U.S. bombing Iran and the Supreme Court ruling on birthright citizenship.
During this time, I’ve found comfort in re-reading older books in my collection. I revisited Ya Gyassi’s debut, Homegoing, finding new appreciation for vague ancestral ties, and Hilary Leichter’s Terrace Story, a novel that packs more weight about grief and the possibilities that await us on the other side than its slim spine would lead you to believe. And then there was returning to 1984.
If you need a quick reminder of the plot, 1984 is set in a world where three superpowers are engaged in continual warfare, and a surveillance state is deployed to keep the management class docile. 2+2 = 5. War is peace. Ignorance is strength. The parallels between our reality and this fictional story published almost 80 years ago serve as a reminder that everything and nothing has changed. When people like Marco Rubio, someone who once proudly championed agencies like USAID, even as recently as six years ago, now all but gleefully relishes its dismantling, 2+2 = 5 indeed.
Of course, reality is sometimes stranger than fiction. There was Signalgate - a scandal in which the editor of the Atlantic was somehow added to a Signal group chat that included both Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as they were planning active military actions. In our “let them eat cake” moment, Katy Perry is somehow relevant enough to go to space for less than 15 minutes. And Republican lawmakers think a $5,000 “baby bonus” is enough to incentivize women to have kids.
Fiction can also serve as a mirror to our reality. One of the buzziest shows of the year so far, Severance, was focused on the dehumanization of corporate workers, yet was made by one of the largest corporations of our time, Apple, which has some questionable labor and human rights practices. An official White House account posted an ASMR video of deportations.
Within Trump’s first hundred days, the scale of change has felt overwhelming. There’s the reduction to the federal workforce, an obsession with tariffs. During this same period, the administration has gone after the Smithsonian collection, including the American Art Museum, the Women’s Museum, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture because certain content “degrade[s] shared American values, divide[s] Americans by race or promote[s] ideologies inconsistent with federal law.” The Naval Academy is banning books like Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings while keeping Mein Kampf on library shelves.
Part of why I’ve been so absent on Substack - across all social media - is that I’ve realized being present is the only thing that has kept me from descending into a bottomless pit of angst about the state of the world.
For the longest time, “being present” was something I conceptually understood but whose meaning had remained elusive.
It wasn’t until March, as I started counting down the days when my MetroCard expired, that I started to think more about how to make the most of the current moment. At the time, I was going through a period of loss. Mourning the death of a grandparent I never knew. A judge finalizing my divorce. The sudden departure of my closest allies at work, co-workers who grew to become friends outside of the office.
Each of these losses forced me to confront how nothing is ever truly stable or a given, to appreciate the people in your life for as long as they’re around, to finally stop saying I was going to do things and just do them.
Over the last three months, I’ve put that mindset to the test. I performed at a live storytelling event. Traveled across the country - Oakland, Dallas, Columbus, LA - to facilitate meetings and workshops with leaders who are trying to make a difference in their community. There were dimly lit dinners and potluck parties on unauthorized roofs. Walking down the block and running into a friend, waving hello to the coffee shop owner who lives in the neighborhood. Joining a food justice group and sitting in a darkened restaurant after hours while learning about how other states are working to protect undocumented workers.
On May 2, I brought together three people who sit at the intersection of art, culture, and politics to discuss the current state of their fields, reflect on the last hundred days, and the role artists should play during this fraught moment. It was the biggest event I’ve ever produced, one that came together in under two months. Everything about that evening was perfect - from the local vendors who donated wine, beer, and aperitifs, to the incredibly patient audio technician who spent over an hour on the phone with me as I learned to set up a mixer for the first time.
There were also quieter, solitary moments, often marked by watching the sunset. One day in early April, I stood by my kitchen window to mark gloam, that final part of the day that stretches out like warm molasses, golden and seemingly infinite. In actuality, three minutes went by, but it felt like an eternity. Maybe because it was. For a brief moment, nothing mattered except watching the light slowly inch over. That was true peace.
As I stood by the window, I wondered how many others had stood where I was, admiring this brief slant of golden light. Was the light just as bright and bittersweet in 1905 as it was in 1925 or ‘65, or 2005? And I thought about what was just around the corner, about what was already in progress, about what hadn’t even begun.
Life is a story of beginnings and endings. Sometimes you will know when something is over. There is a finality to someone’s last day of work as they return their laptop and key cards, receive last-minute hugs and tearful goodbyes. There is a gray area, like the MetroCard, something that’s gone only if you cared enough to notice. But most things we don’t mark. The last time you played outside with your siblings, chasing fireflies in the muggy evening air. Passing a mural on your way to work that’s painted over by the time you come home.
These are the small tragedies and petty dramas that are woven into the fabric of our lives. I find these moments particularly fascinating because of how fleeting they are. I am incredibly fortunate to have had a chance to mark when something is ending or just starting. During this particularly turbulent period, perhaps what can ground us is recognizing and appreciating something for what it is, not what it was or will be.
