Metropolitan Line: the only drug I need

In preference to taking illegal substances, why not try the London Tube, alone, at night? While listening to The Mars Volta (Frances). Damn it was weird.

The Metropolitan line goes above ground, but the carriages are well lit, so you can't see much outside the windows - only the reflection of the seats beside me. But occasionally things flash into view, anything lit brightly enough to register, and they appear and disappear in the most surreal fashion, the only things that have any existence in that vast, dark city. Other trains roar past at impossible speed, and impossibly close, and are gone, the images of the faces of their hundreds of passengers dissipating before my mind has even formed them, then lingering on like ghosts. Every few seconds, great cracks of electricity light up the windowframes on all the surrounding houses in blue, and suddenly there are homes and lives out there. The great underlit arc of Wembley Stadium hovers above the suburbs. Each station slides into view, and the world outside exists again, with its possibilities and places to go, and a minute later it's back to tunnel vision, and there is nothing but this empty train carriage. Walls and barriers and all kinds of unidentifiable things loom out of the dark, rushing straight at me, then disappear at the moment of impact, and were nothing but reflections. It is impossible to orient oneself.

Ten minute walk from the station to the flat. In the little coccoon I've made for myself with my mp3 player, I'm trying not to sing along with Iron and Wine. My soul is elated, and there is nowhere for it to rest out there - not till I get home, and can lock myself away in my own (for now) tiny little slice of London. Cities are so strange. The people aren't real. Just landscape features. There isn't time or energy to make them all real, even for the brief moment in which they are on my radar. If I let myself try I don't know if I'd... shit. You shouldn't mix your drugs.