DAY 05.

We are thrown together by circumstance. The sun is on our backs and we squint as we look down the road. We wait. It’s all we seem to do anymore.

This commute is not one we take by personal choice. It is a necessity. We are the unlucky few who live too far away to walk and are too poor to drive. Perhaps some of us are just lazy. Why spend a half an hour moving our legs when we can spend forty minutes waiting impatiently for a school bus disguised as a shuttle?

The elusive bus sputters and whines as the brakes are hit in front of our stop. We are a haggard bunch of strangers beaten down by days’ events. Some of us have had enough of the bullshit that this year is sure to bring. Some of us are involved in a very top-secret comic book club. Money is exchanged in a conspiratorial manner. We put our headphones on and tune out the outside world. We shift our backpacks and think about what we’ll eat for dinner. We dread returning home to an empty apartment. We sneeze.

We get on the bus.

None of us want to sit with each other. That would imply that we want to converse. We all have so many things to say but we don’t want to waste the words on people we don’t know. We keep our banal thoughts inside our heads as we pull out of the parking lot. The seats feel no more comfortable as they did when we rode these buses in elementary school. The green upholstery is peeling. We pick at stray pieces of stuffing coming out of the seats in front of us. We lean our heads on the windows. We tap our feet. We eavesdrop.

The bus driver strikes up a conversation with us. We aren’t sure who he’s talking to but there’s no way we can avoid him. We are all trapped in this cage of metal and rolling wheels. The drive back isn’t long, but today it feels like an eternity. We listen to him discuss his great Aunt Mildred. She’s turning 92 soon. We don’t care but we can’t stop listening. We crane our necks to see outside the windows, feeling jealous of all of the other riders getting off before the rest of us.

We are subjected to more information about Aunt Mildred. We begin to question the sanity of our bus driver as he talks about the ways he could make his poor Aunt Mildred kick the bucket. All he needs is an air-tight alibi. He’s been mentioned in her will. She’s in perfect health. We don’t make eye contact with him as he peers back at us. Only one of us decides to answer his questions. The rest of us stare at each other, wondering if this is actually happening.

We hate this ride. Our backpacks are heavy against our bodies and we hope we’ve remembered our keys. We go through lists of things we need to get at the grocery store. We send dirty text messages to our significant others to pass the time. We despise Wednesdays.