Bus

I have a lot on my mind.

I have taken to getting on the bus and staying on it until the end of the line, then getting out and riding it all the way back. Being in transit gives me the illusion of a suspension of time.

While on the bus, I find solace in its uneven movement. I look out into the San Francisco night and its soft glimmer and am reminded just how restorative, how indispensable beauty is.

I eavesdrop on conversations, which tend to cast my own bright life in a different, more forgiving speckled light.

I let my mobile devices take turns and think, think and work in an ambulatory setting with an ever-changing view where I am not interrupted. The resulting, partially accidental productivity settles me.

I am weary of platitudes. I don’t need reminders of the value of life or the importance of love or our lack of control or how change must be embraced ugh bla bla bla I already know. I know.

My role in this bus is that of an anonymous, probably disheveled, mathematically middle-aged woman. I am no one's friend, no one’s coworker or lover or daughter or sister or tenant. I need to do nothing here. I am no one here, just the weak, see-through reflection on someone's large, dark window pane; the high pitched, possibly grating, foreign language phone conversation another overhears, perhaps casting his own life in a different light.

And I have the most beautiful city in the world displaying itself to me, and it’s just a bit beyond my reach because really I am somewhere else right now.  Somewhere that exists only in a girl I used to be.