062006 Walking Dead free-re-vision
The bus had a rocking motion that felt like resting against mother’s chest and listening to her heartbeat and taking her in through my nose. A gentle back and forth motion combined with a series of sudden starts and stops that were nothing like mother at all.
The chairs were the kind of plastic that bled stuffing out of the deep gouges in some places and, in other places, it had cracked open on it’s own. Old advertisements adorned the ceiling, hanging limply, reminding people to cross the street carefully. The pedestrian safety was as much in the hands of the pedestrian as in the hands of the driver driving the car and carelessly reckless, not watching, not looking, not seeing, but already at their destination, and thus forgetting everything in between.
The bus was like that, like not remembering everything in between, just two points that connected. Some how.
The smell alternated between fermenting throw up, disinfectant and old beer at the bottom of the can left out in the sun for days and days. It was the kind of smell you expected to permeate you, your clothes and your skin. Though, I’m not sure if it actually did, or if it was just the idea that permeated.
The people already on the bus, at that hour of the morning before the sun joined the living and the walking dead, sat up back bone straight fingering the pages of newspapers and discarding the parts they thought uninteresting of the parts that had already been read. Generally there was a pattern to the laying down of sections, it started with the Currents, the Sports or the Business sections. Only certain people ever read the business section.
Other people, women perhaps obviously, curled their eyelashes and slathered on mascara in great exaggerated flicks of the wrist. The ritual of make up involved stretching the mouth beyond any normal expression of joy or anger or bereavement. It was comical in the way it didn’t replicate any natural order save for the line of the mouth.
The aisle down the center of the bus, while sensible, I’m sure, from an engineering standpoint, left me on parade. The people already on the bus, wedged uncomfortable in the seats made one-size-fits-all, turned their gaze on me, in one way or another. A sidled glance over a book, through a newspaper, or a direct unflinching gaze. Unescapable.
I walked down the aisle towards the back of the bus, not to be a martyr or anything. Rosa Parks days are over. It was less crowded. I looked at either the ground or towards the seat I intended to take.
It was odd, this sort of desperation in invasion. Meeting someone else’s gaze, when it happened, was like a shock of electricity surging through the body, starting at the feet and rushing up, over taking the spine, seeping into the spinal cord and enveloping the cerebrum in an uncomfortable embrace.
And so what, why should I care if someone else is looking at me. Does it matter? I don’t remember what it’s like to look into someone else’s eyes.
The eyes meeting is a connection. A series of neural relays, a talking among the parts, registering and processing, then filing. But there is something else ineffable in the act of seeing and being seen. Only that reciprocal act. The gaze that is met. Intent and intent. There is a place where the space between is diminished.
I sat down.
The air inside the bus was stale and lingered at the back of the throat like a cough. I couldn’t help but think that, while sitting in the bus, the skin cells drifting off, the content of the breath, hair follicles, particles of us falling off at a rate incomprehensible in the sheer wonder of it, that we were sitting there, nose in books, eyes out of windows, the blur of time going by, breathing each other in.
The chairs were the kind of plastic that bled stuffing out of the deep gouges in some places and, in other places, it had cracked open on it’s own. Old advertisements adorned the ceiling, hanging limply, reminding people to cross the street carefully. The pedestrian safety was as much in the hands of the pedestrian as in the hands of the driver driving the car and carelessly reckless, not watching, not looking, not seeing, but already at their destination, and thus forgetting everything in between.
The bus was like that, like not remembering everything in between, just two points that connected. Some how.
The smell alternated between fermenting throw up, disinfectant and old beer at the bottom of the can left out in the sun for days and days. It was the kind of smell you expected to permeate you, your clothes and your skin. Though, I’m not sure if it actually did, or if it was just the idea that permeated.
The people already on the bus, at that hour of the morning before the sun joined the living and the walking dead, sat up back bone straight fingering the pages of newspapers and discarding the parts they thought uninteresting of the parts that had already been read. Generally there was a pattern to the laying down of sections, it started with the Currents, the Sports or the Business sections. Only certain people ever read the business section.
Other people, women perhaps obviously, curled their eyelashes and slathered on mascara in great exaggerated flicks of the wrist. The ritual of make up involved stretching the mouth beyond any normal expression of joy or anger or bereavement. It was comical in the way it didn’t replicate any natural order save for the line of the mouth.
The aisle down the center of the bus, while sensible, I’m sure, from an engineering standpoint, left me on parade. The people already on the bus, wedged uncomfortable in the seats made one-size-fits-all, turned their gaze on me, in one way or another. A sidled glance over a book, through a newspaper, or a direct unflinching gaze. Unescapable.
I walked down the aisle towards the back of the bus, not to be a martyr or anything. Rosa Parks days are over. It was less crowded. I looked at either the ground or towards the seat I intended to take.
It was odd, this sort of desperation in invasion. Meeting someone else’s gaze, when it happened, was like a shock of electricity surging through the body, starting at the feet and rushing up, over taking the spine, seeping into the spinal cord and enveloping the cerebrum in an uncomfortable embrace.
And so what, why should I care if someone else is looking at me. Does it matter? I don’t remember what it’s like to look into someone else’s eyes.
The eyes meeting is a connection. A series of neural relays, a talking among the parts, registering and processing, then filing. But there is something else ineffable in the act of seeing and being seen. Only that reciprocal act. The gaze that is met. Intent and intent. There is a place where the space between is diminished.
I sat down.
The air inside the bus was stale and lingered at the back of the throat like a cough. I couldn’t help but think that, while sitting in the bus, the skin cells drifting off, the content of the breath, hair follicles, particles of us falling off at a rate incomprehensible in the sheer wonder of it, that we were sitting there, nose in books, eyes out of windows, the blur of time going by, breathing each other in.
posted by InkSpot | 11:20 PM
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