The Whole World Is a Conveyor Belt
The Munich U-Bahn is a masterclass in studied indifference. Simon and I rode in from Harras toward Marienplatz, and I spent the whole trip doing what I always do on public transit: sorting people into categories they’d hate to know they belonged to. The Book Reader—thick hardcover pressed to the chest like a shield, shoulders rounded inward, feet slightly pigeon-toed, a studied avoidance of eye contact so complete it becomes its own kind of performance. The Newspaper Reader—shirt tucked, nice leather shoes, lips moving faintly with each sentence, paper folded under one arm until the stop announcement comes, at which point it gets jammed between the seat and window and abandoned like it was never there. Then the Cool Kids with the oversized jeans and earbuds in, heads nodding fractionally with whatever beat they’re running, eyes locked on the window glass. And the gossip contingent, two or three of them so deep in conversation you can miss your stop just from half-listening. One had a small dog in her handbag. It stared at me the entire ride.
We were technically there so Simon could see my newly arranged apartment—I’d finally got it looking the way I wanted and needed a second opinion from someone whose taste I trusted—but we turned the visit into a full shopping sweep through central Munich. Simon was decisive and fast. I trailed behind him with a lilac scarf from some incense shop that still smelled exactly like the inside of a head-shop even after I’d paid for it.
Then the jacket. A leather jacket hanging at Mango with the quiet confidence of something that knows it’s already won. I put it on. It fit. I looked at myself in the mirror for a long moment and thought: yes. Some clothes don’t just fit the body—they fit some version of yourself you’d like to be more often. I bought it. Then shoes, jeans, and a large purple leather bag that required three separate passes through the store before I finally committed. Simon was satisfied. I was satisfied. We were collectively about €350 lighter and running on empty.
We found a sushi place near Marienplatz—all-you-can-eat from the conveyor belt, €10.90 for an hour. We sat by the window and stacked our plates into a tower of considerable ambition. And from that seat, watching the shopping street outside, I noticed something: the people moving past the glass had exactly the same rhythm as the sushi moving past on the belt. Same glazed forward momentum, same sense of not having exactly chosen to be there but ending up there anyway. The Shakespeare line kept running through my head—all the world’s a stage, all the men and women merely players—except it wasn’t a stage at all. It was a conveyor belt. And we weren’t the audience. We were the sushi.
We skipped the raw fish slices, which smelled aggressively wrong. Everything else went. We rolled home to my apartment afterward, feet aching, and finished the day with pizza in front of the TV. The leather jacket was hanging on the back of my chair. I kept glancing at it.