Crawling Back to You

Calla Smith

Savannah learned that there were so many different kinds of faces: open half-moon faces, faces scrunched up like balls of dough ready for the oven, and hard faces like fists. They all came and went with the sharp alarms of the doors and the sudden movement of the subway as it traveled back and forth from one end of the city to another. 

At first, it was hard for her to keep her balance, but she soon got used to it, as if she were a sailor on the heaving deck of a ship. Sometimes, if she closed her eyes, she could imagine that it was an unruly sea causing her to jerk back and forth on the unsteady floor, and not a machine that hadn’t been designed to give anyone a smooth ride. 

But none of that mattered. Not the jostling of the bodies around her, not the angry mouths, not all the times she had fallen. Savannah was there with her guitar to sing, even if it was only a few songs at a time. Down in that poorly-lit subterranean world, she could be whoever she needed to be. Her voice was unwavering, getting stronger every day, filling the air even above the screech of the breaks on the tracks. 

She did it for the money, of course, but she also did it to see the shift in people’s eyes when she played that song, the one that they wanted to hear no matter what time of day it was, the one that surprised them when she played the first few notes, and they smiled like nothing had ever surprised them before. 

Savannah knew that was all she was to them—at best, a moment of joy; at worst, an interruption to whatever they were reading on their phones. But even if the coins they threw in her hat were the difference between being able to live the elusive dream for one more week or finally giving up, like her family wanted her to. 

She was sure no one recognized her, but she knew them. She knew when they went to work and what time they came back. Even if they met her eyes and smiled, she knew they would soon forget her in their busy lives, and she liked it that way. She loved traveling with all those passengers, not knowing exactly where she was going or how far away she would end up from where she wanted to be. 

But one day, late at night, she was on the last train and found herself hauling her guitar out into the city streets where the stars shone brightly. A young man who had come alive with her rendition of “Do I Wanna Know” passed her on the stairs, smiling and wishing her good night. She nodded back and kept going, telling herself he would soon forget her. Even if she knew that he always took the last train back on Thursdays, smelling like he had had a few beers with friends after work. The delicate balance of her world hung on that thin thread of her invisibility. But the next Thursday, he was there again, and even though she tried to ignore her as she sang, he asked her if she needed any help carrying anything and told her his name was Noah. Savannah felt as though the bricks around her were crumbling. And it couldn’t be a coincidence that their eyes met across the dancefloor at her favorite club that weekend. 

When Savannah visited her parents the next week, he was sitting in a café just a few blocks from the station in their quiet, residential neighborhood. His thin lips lifted in a smile as he waved at Savannah hurrying by. 

This meeting was one step too far. Savannah tried changing the times and routes she sang on, but Noah would be there every few weeks. Savannah’s world of indifferent souls and emptiness was no longer the same because somewhere out there was someone who saw her, someone who seemed to be waiting around every corner. Someone was out there waiting to be discovered, even if it meant dancing alone in the crowded subway to the tune of the Arctic Monkeys.