Metro steps

Little is reliable in Mexico. Actually, scratch that. Loads of things are reliably unreliable, such as anything and everything relating to time, safety of food (whether served from the street, one with many lanes, on plastic that resembles a frisbee more than a plate or from a purportedly fancy restaurant that makes your mother sick when she orders a salad) and prices of anything from a taxi to a steak on a laminated menu with a picture of a steak and 120 pesos written adjacent in comic sans. But in a world of such obscurity and bargaining and dependence on independence I found a constant. It happens in the morning.

It happens when I descend the steps of metro Patriotismo. A man and a woman sit to the far left. She rests on the penultimate step just above the middle platform, where you can see the trains coming and going before your final descent down longer steps, most of them under a "No Pase" sign that no one acknowledges. He, on the other hand, sits one, maybe two, steps above her. They are average looking people, one with a mustache and the other with a mullet. They do not embrace. They do not appear to talk. They look at the metros, coming and going every minute or so to collect more sleepy-eyed commuters and leave a few behind.


I do not know who they are or why they sit at the metro above the trains or if they are lovers or if they are lovers but behind the backs of another. I do not know if they are good people or what would make them good or bad people in my eyes but I can rely on them between 7:44 a.m. and 7:52 a.m., Monday through Friday.