Picture by my 9year-old. Woman waiting for the bus, reading.
This piece is loosely based on places and events in my life. I wrote it for the
Social Club symposium with the theme “Buses”. It is my first piece specifically for this club. I hope you enjoy it.Long-distance bus rides and the bus stations they arrive at and leave from bring a lot of charged memories, most of them sad. For example, I remember nausea. I recall most of the stations I have left from or arrived to have this distinct smell, a mixture of exhaust fumes, tobacco, rotten food, and dirt. The once white tiles patched with an infinite number of dry chewing gums, now black, blending their strawberry, fresh mint, and eucalyptus flavours to produce a new one that possibly tastes of cyanide. This atmosphere attracts an assorted population of dwellers; passers-by with their luggage; permanent residents sitting on cardboard boxes, pushing supermarket trolleys containing all their belongings.
I have often wondered what it is about bus stations that attracts the homeless and the hopeless to come there and stay there. Maybe they arrived in the big city looking for an opportunity, and once here, they didn’t know where to go, so they stayed until they blended with the environment, part of the landscape. Maybe they wanted to leave but didn’t pluck up the courage to get on the bus. So they lingered, and they despaired.
It is weird, though. The destitute phenomenon is just observed around bus stations; train stations not only smell better (the perks of electricity) but also do not seem so enticing to people who have nowhere to go.
I spent six years taking an 8-hour bus ride from home to university and back again. I would do this for every holiday I had and whenever I wanted to spend a long weekend at home. I hated those bus rides, but mostly the ones from home back to university.
You could ride the bus during the day, which was a waste of time, or at night, which was a nightmare. Stopping midway in a godforsaken sideroad restaurant just outside a semi-abandoned village where old people had been left to fend for themselves and from where the young ones had escaped looking for a better future. A desert. How many of those young people who were lured into the city were now living in a cardboard box under the mechanical stairs of the bus station? My mind travelling to the lost souls we had left behind, watching the days go by, all the same, maybe tomorrow a little worse than today.
At this halfway restaurant stop, I would buy half a ham baguette, the dry bread crumbling after the first bite, and I would make a mess of breadcrumbs and olive oil dripping on my coat. At least there was always a KIT KAT to look forward to.
I would look around and see my fellow travellers, mostly students themselves, who had sat down to eat, somehow biting into my same sandwich without an oil stain in sight, no scraps of food around them. People who always managed to find someone to make conversation with. This I was in awe of; small talk being an elusive skill for me. I felt jealous of their mastery at meaninglessness, wishing I could fit in with them but feeling no curiosity whatsoever about what they talked about. Knowing forehand it was vacuous chitchat, rich people talk about their stupendous skiing holiday, their sensational summer vacation on some sandy beach surrounded by likeminded people, the strenuous weeks ahead with the upcoming exams, their skittish laughter at how, after their scrumptious Christmas break, their pants were too tight. The irony or it, rich people on the bus.
Yes, what I hated the most about these trips was the feeling of inadequacy. No one to talk to; waiting to get back on the bus to take me to a place I did not really want to go to, nor belonged to, to become someone I didn’t like, surrounded by the many students with the same destination as me but with whom I felt less kinship than the homeless men and women who lurked in the corners of the bus station.
Ooooo i feel like this is the introductory chapter to a longer story. . .would love to know more about your university experience. . .and absolutely love the thoughtful poignancy of your essay
Loved this piece. I too have felt
In awe for the "masters of meaninglessness." But never figured out how to describe it so well.