Subway Conversation

The 7-train at rush hour is a "fucking standing Benetton ad," to borrow from the white guy in the Mets shirt who was standing a few inches away from me. My car was full of white people in Mets shirts, and Latinos and Asians going back to Queens after a day of hard work.
I was sweating and, from the smell of the train, I could tell everyone else was. I avoided people's eyes by keeping mine fixed in my New Yorker and, everytime the doors opened, I hoped somebody would get off the train. It didn't happen. A girl walked in at the first stop out of Manhattan and she stood right next to me.
We were holding on to the same post, and she asked, "Is this the train to Jackson Heights?." "I don't know, but there's a map right there," I said. I sounded like a douche, without meaning to, so then I said, "but what's your stop? Maybe I can help you."
She wanted to go to 74th St., I think, so I told her to switch to the local line on Queensboro Plaza. She thanked me. Then I started to talk to her about other things, trying to practice my people skills. I started with the first obvious question that came to my mind: "so you're not from around here?," and it ended up she was from around, but never really took the Subway to get around. We kept on talking about other things, like the recent death of Michael Jackson and that I used to watch his movies as a kid, that she was going to Berkeley College and that my college education didn't really pay the way I wanted to, and that I knew only two words in Bengala, which ended up being foods (I learned them at a restaurant).
As we neared Queensboro Plaza, I wasn't sweating so much. Maybe I was keeping my cool. She asked me for my e-mail, which she wrote down in the iPhone, and we parted ways. I've been checking my inbox every few hours since that day, but only work mail comes in.
Sometimes I wish more Subway people would get in there more often.