The bus ride
Yesterday night I sat at the Bertastrasse bus stop a block away from Kiwi’s apartment. The last bus of the evening was coming at exactly 12:26 a.m. I was alone. Being alone is not a new experience for me at all, it’s just a part of my existence that I’m typically able to avoid as an actual experience by occupying myself with endless ongoing projects. When I’m not with people I’m involved in a project, or thinking about a project, or recording thoughts for a project on my phone so I don’t forget them, or scribbling ideas for a project down on a piece of paper. Last night I forgot about all of these things for twenty minutes.
Occasionally a car would go screaming past in the dark. With no cops out late, people speed around the suburbs in their Beemers and Mercedes and Ferraris and Aston Martins. A Vespa with a plastic milk crate tied to the back passed me. A man walking alone with the collar of his jacket upturned passed me, a trail of smoke following leisurely behind his cigarette.
“When the bus comes the electrical wires shake,” Kiwi had said to me. There was a high pitched whirring sound, the wires reverberated, and the bus headlights appeared from beyond the intersection to my left. The bus driver pulled over just for me, since I was the only one at the stop and no one got off. I sat down near the front and stared out the window, thin tears collecting at the corners of my eyes.
There were only a few people on the bus, a couple, a man standing, some women at the back. The couple spoke in Chinese accented English, the man talked on his cell phone in French, and the ladies in the back whispered in German. “I am tired worrying about what everyone think of me,” the Asian girl said to the guy sitting next to her. The bus turned left at a Y-forked intersection, drove through several red lights as the busses are allowed to do in Zurich, and bounced down the road towards the next stop.
We passed cobblestone streets and pink and blue buildings, graffiti and dumpsters neatly tucked in alleys, flowerboxes in dark windows, a dimly lit bar, a teenager on a skateboard, the man walking with his upturned coat collar. We passed that apartment my company owns, where you and I stayed one Zurich autumn when the trees refused to let go of summer and stayed bright and green through a snowstorm, where we hid under multiple blankets, yellow and red, laughing about the cold, where we met the guy from Sydney and the guy from London, and the next door neighbor who showed me how to unlock my front door.
At an intersection we passed a tram whose driver waved, and our bus driver waved back. We turned left at Sihlcity, and right at Waffenplatz, and at Jugendherberge no one got out. I jumped off at Morgental, this bus’ last stop, and walked to the tram stop just as the number 7 came around the corner. I climbed aboard the tram and wiped my eyes. It seems like last week I had that dream where you got on the bus without me and it drove away, and you never told the driver he’d left someone behind. You had watched me through the window as I became small in the distance.
I walked to the front of the tram and as I stepped down the stairs, I said “Guten Abend” through the driver’s half open window. “Abend,” came back at me as the tram doors closed. I watched it pull away, whirring as it rolled up the hill. I walked a block home and through a huge garden of blooming summer bulbs in the moonlight. As I fumbled with the key to the door of my building, I was back there, in Istanbul last week, sitting on the marble terrace in the Mediterranean breeze. “My mom says she likes you because you’re always happy and smiling,” BigG had said to me from across the glass table.
I smiled and unlocked the door.
