The doors close and everyone stops talking. Six adults in a metal box the size of a broom closet, all of us studying the numbers above the door like they might change if we look hard enough. Nobody breathes wrong. There's a rule in here nobody wrote down: you face front, you hold your bag against your chest, you make yourself smaller than you are.
I know why now. It's the same reason nobody talks on a spacewalk more than they have to. When there's a thin wall between you and a way you could die, the animal part of you goes quiet and pays attention. This box is hanging from a cable in a shaft, and everyone in it knows, somewhere under the small talk they're not making, exactly how far down the ground is.
Up there the whole planet does the same trick on you. You look at it hanging in the black and you understand, as a plain fact, that the layer of air keeping eight billion people alive is thinner than the shell of an egg. You can see it at the edge, a blue line you could smudge with your thumb.
So I don't mind the silence in here anymore. A man got in on four, saw me holding the door, and gave me a small nod. That was all. A stranger, in a box on a cable, deciding to be kind for half a second before the doors opened and he was gone.
I used to think elevators were dead time. Now I stand in them and I count us.
Six people, sharing the last few feet of a very long fall, being careful with each other for no reason at all.