The winner takes it all

The winner takes it all

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I have been staring at my emails, seeing the reflection of my face lying on the phone screen for the past two stops. I pressed my head against the cool, condensed window, but the glass wasn’t actually cold; it was just lukewarm. Looking into the dark noir tunnel, I thought about my life. I was on the subway going home from work. I’m an accountant, boring shit honestly. Yes, it has a decent salary, but it's just a tedious office job that gives you just enough money to feed your family, with no extras to actually enjoy living. Everyone says ‘life is a beautiful continuous journey of learning, connection, and growth’, but for me, life is the ongoing nag that I am not good enough and never will be; that’s what life is. A slow cycle that never finishes.

​People say that I should be grateful for what I have, how lucky I am to have even a job, to even be able to experience having any money at all, and I want to agree, but how can I? Every day I see successful businessmen who are billionaires, having the time of their lives. Or there are those celebrities, getting to do what they love, their passion, while everyone practically worships them for it. ‘The winner takes it all’, isn’t that what ABBA says? Then there are people like me, whose fate is not to live, just to survive. No, I don’t work very hard, but no one can really expect me to when there is nothing to work hard for, right?

My days are measured entirely in rows and columns. I spend eight hours a day in a windowless cubicle under the hum of flickering fluorescent lights, inputting numbers into spreadsheets that nobody really reads, balancing ledger sheets for clients I will never meet. It’s a life built on margins and decimals, a sterile existence where the biggest highlight of the week is a spreadsheet formula working on the first try. When the clock strikes five, I join the sea of identical grey suits pouring out of the building. We don't look at each other. We just shuffle forward, a colony of ants driven by habit, stepping onto the concrete stairs of the escalator that carries us straight back down into the belly of the underground subway.

​Down here, the outside world ceases to exist. Seasons lose their meaning when your entire day is subterranean. To me, it was just another Tuesday evening. Just another dark, damp commute where the only temperature that mattered was the stale, suffocating heat blowing out from the vents beneath my seat. I knew exactly what the next three hours looked like: a delayed connection, a walk through a grey neighborhood, a quick dinner, a few hours of uninspired television, and a fitful night of sleep before waking up to do it all over again. My brain is on autopilot every single day. The track ahead of me was perfectly straight, perfectly predictable, and perfectly exhausting.

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But then, the rhythm that had been going for what felt like years changed.

The heavy, metallic roar of the subway echo began to drop in pitch. The train wasn't screeching to a sudden halt, but rather reluctantly dragging its feet, the wheels groaning as we climbed a gradual incline. I frowned, looking around the carriage. We were supposed to be deep underground, locked into the absolute predictability of the city line.

Slowly, the dark concrete walls of the tunnel gave way to open space. The subway car broke out onto the surface tracks, but the thick film of condensation on the glass completely blinded me to what lay beyond. The window was just a smear of black and grey, offering no clues as to where we were.

The train crept to a crawl, the motor humming a low, dying note before shuddering to a complete stop alongside a dim, outdoor platform. A static hiss popped over the intercom.

“Is this thing working?”asked a man through the intercom as he cleared his voice a bit. He had a deep raspy voice. He sounded annoyed, just as frustrated as all of us were right now, underground, in the depths of God knows where. I suspected he was probably the train driver, but I was still confused. Why did we stop?

“Your driver here-” Yes I knew it. A sudden wave of my old cocky childhood self washed over me for a brief second, and suddenly, I forgot about all the confusion, the continuous cycle, and just breathed for a bit. I can’t remember the last time I felt proud of what I was right for and wasn’t embarrassed or had to become silenced because we live in a democratic society. Practically only because it was in my head and it was such a small topic, but still, God forbid a man be happy after geez maybe 30 years of poker face.

“-we’ve got a severe signal failure on the main line ahead,” the driver’s voice continued, the speaker crackling with a harsh, electric static that made a few people in the front rows wince. “The points are frozen solid. This service terminates here. I’m going to have to ask everyone to vacate the train. A replacement bus service has been requested, but given the road conditions outside, it’s going to be a considerable wait. Please step carefully onto the platform.”

The intercom died with a sharp, definitive click.

For a few seconds, nobody moved. The carriage hung in a stunned, collective silence, the kind that happens right before a storm breaks. Then, the uproar began.

It started with a heavy, synchronised wave of angry groans. The man sitting next to me slammed his laptop shut with a violent click, muttering a string of curses as he shoved it into his leather briefcase. Across the aisle, a woman was already frantically tapping her phone screen, her manicured nails clicking against the blue-light glass like gunfire. Within moments, the air was thick with the sound of overlapping, anxious voices. People were whispering sharply into their phones, lying to their spouses about when they’d be home, or emailing managers to explain why they wouldn't make the evening briefing.

They were absolutely terrified of being late to the very routines that were draining the life out of them. I watched them shift in their seats, their faces tight with a desperate, frantic panic. Thoughts rushing through their brains about compensation, whether they will even get it or not.

But I just sat there.

I stayed glued to my seat, watching the chaos unfold around me like a movie playing on fast-forward while I remained on pause. A strange, quiet wave of relief was beginning to spread through my chest, untying the knot that had been holding me hostage. The cycle had broken. For the first time in years, the track wasn't taking me where I was expected to go. The automated spreadsheet of my life had just thrown a massive error code, and for once, it wasn't my job to fix it.

I didn't care about the replacement bus. I didn't care that my microwave dinner would stay in the fridge, or that I’d miss whatever mindless television program was scheduled to numb my brain tonight.

My mind drifted back to that flash of childhood cockiness. I remembered being ten years old, standing at the front of a classroom, absolutely certain of an answer, bursting to speak. Back then, the world felt wide open, full of variables and unanswered questions. Somewhere between university applications, corporate training modules, and the steady, numbing comfort of a predictable salary, that boy had been entirely erased. He had been balanced out of the ledger, replaced by a man who wore a grey suit and never made eye contact on the escalator.

Around me, the line of commuters had begun to shuffle down the narrow aisle, moving like a sluggish, disgruntled snake toward the exit. I finally stood up, smoothing down the front of my suit jacket, and buttoned the top button. I took my time. There was no rush anymore.

I joined the back of the queue, listening to the wet slap of shoes against the linoleum floor as we neared the double doors. When the automated exit finally slid open with a heavy, pneumatic sigh, the world changed before I even crossed the threshold.

First came the smell. It wasn't the metallic, dust-heavy scent of the underground tunnels, nor was it the stale coffee and wet wool of the carriage. It was crisp. Sharp. It smelled entirely of nothing, which was the cleanest thing I had inhaled in months.

Then, the temperature hit. A sudden, freezing draft rushed into the stuffy train, colliding with the artificial heat. The people in front of me immediately gasped, pulling their collars up to their chin and shivering violently.

I took my first step out of the carriage. The moment my right foot cleared the metal gap, my leather loafer didn't hit concrete. It sank.

It sank into three inches of crisp, heavy powder. I froze, one foot suspended in the warm, stagnant air of the carriage, the other buried in the absolute silence of the outside world. I looked down, completely stunned. The black leather of my loafer had vanished beneath a pristine, undisturbed layer of white. It wasn’t a gentle, picturesque flurry drifting lazily under city streetlights. It was a silent, heavy downpour of massive white flakes that seemed to swallow the sky, turning this abandoned station into a muffled sanctuary.

While I had been trapped inside my own skull for the last forty five minutes, staring at stale emails, envying billionaires, and worrying about a salary that never felt like enough, the sky had been quietly dismantling the entire world.

A sharp, violent shiver rippled through my spine as the biting winter air tore straight through my thin suit jacket. I breathed in, and the sudden drop in temperature caught in my throat, turning my exhale into a thick, billowing plume of white vapor. It stung my lungs, but it was a good sting. A wake-up call. I stepped fully out onto the platform, my left foot sinking into the snow to match the right.

Behind me, the station was a chaotic mess of modern anxiety. The queue of passengers poured out of the doors, instantly fracturing into a desperate scramble for survival. They huddled under the single, flickering halogen light of the platform overhang, their faces washed in the familiar, frantic blue glow of their phones. People were pacing back and forth, stamping their feet, and shouting over the wind at a lone, visibly exhausted station guard.

"What do you mean, hours for a bus?" a man in a heavy overcoat barked, his voice echoing off the concrete. "I have a conference call with Tokyo at eight!"

"My kids are at the childminder's!" a woman cried out, her manicured fingers trembling as she redialed a number for the fourth time. "Is there no taxi service? Can we call an Uber?"

They were trapped in the panic of the broken routine, desperately trying to patch the error code in their spreadsheets. A few hours ago, I would have been right there with them, calculating the exact financial loss of a ruined evening, tracking the minutes like lost currency. But standing here, listening to the muffled, damp quiet of the storm, their voices felt incredibly far away. They sounded like background noise on a television set left on in another room.

I turned my back on the crowd and the flickering light, walking toward the far, unlit end of the platform where the rusted iron tracks vanished into the whiteout.

With every step, the sound of the commuters grew fainter, swallowed by the thick blanket of snow. The world felt completely different out here, away from the subterranean tunnels and the windowless cubicles. The snow covered everything: the cracked concrete of the old platform, the rusted metal benches, the decaying wooden signs of a station whose name had long since faded away. It leveled the playing field. Underneath six inches of white, an accountant's cheap leather loafers looked exactly the same as a CEO's bespoke Oxfords. The margins were gone. The decimals didn't matter.

I stopped at the very edge of the platform, right where the concrete ended and the open country began. I pulled my hands deep into my pockets and simply stood there, looking up into expanse of swallowed snow

The flakes drifted down, landing softly on my eyelashes and melting against my cheeks. Tomorrow, the reality of my life would be waiting for me. The alarm would still ring at half past six. The windowless cubicle would still hum with fluorescent light, the spreadsheets would still need balancing, and the nagging, heavy weight of not being good enough would undoubtedly find its way back into my chest. Nothing was permanently fixed. The tedious office job wasn't going anywhere, and my fate was likely still just to survive the slow, unending cycle.

But tonight, the track had run out of predictability. Tonight, the world had forced everything to a complete, beautiful stop.

I closed my eyes, listening to the absolute silence of the falling snow, and for the first time in a very long time, I didn't care about the next stop. I was completely fine with being stuck. Looks like you can still learn things in life.