Lights slide by in the darkness of the bus window. Unfamiliar patters of colors and light. A known in the unknown does not exist here. It is raining hard. The rain here is different than in Portland. There it is a soft drizzle that you can evade, that barely makes you damp. Here in five minutes your shoes will be ruined for days, your umbrella is worthless because of the wind that come in at an angle, and you will be left soaked though every layer you have on. It is an unforgiving rain that makes no exceptions.
All I can see now is a steady stream of headlights. Inside the bus, no one is paying attention to the world outside or inside for that matter. Closed up like turtles in their own world, a commuter bus becomes a time in which we fail to see. Wanting to arrive at point B from point A, we forget there is a space between two points, space that propels us forward through time. It is good to be writing again. I should be working, but I have taken this as a breathing space instead, listening to the mechanic whir of the engine and the hiss of tires of wet pavement. Red tail lights reflect off the wet windshield, filling the front of the bus momentarily with color.
Academics have a word for everything. We neatly put our thoughts in to deliberately crafted that make us sound “oh, so elegant,” and yet from what I know of myself, it is artifice that is one thing I can master. It is the one thing I have in a world of chaos, a little island of order as Frost would say.
