Sunday
As always when I find myself on the brink of total collapse of everything I cherish and desire, I went for a walk back to my old neighborhood.
It’s windy and cold today. It’s a better off staying in bed under the covers and reading day is what today is. Almost Spring according to the calendar, but a minute away from snowing according to the clouds and temperature. I walked and smoked. I was random and that is how I wanted it today. I noticed a person waiting at a bus stop ahead of me and remembered that I had one last ticket in my wallet. It symbolized a responsible way of saving money to and from a job that no longer existed and so I decided to use it up on this used up day and turned around and walked back 100 feet and took up claim on my own personal bus stop. My own bus stop. I paced back and forth and waited 30 minutes for the bus to finally come.
After a five minute ride, I was at my transfer point and I got off and found my new stop, leaned against a telephone pole covered in twenty thousand rusted staples and waited again. The staples dug into my back and I let them. I had company at the stop this time; two people, strangers, both of them wearing their own private problems they would rather forget on shitty, cold days like this and ear bud headphones to block out everything else. We three silently agreed to ignore each other and I waited and smoked again.
The wind gusts were making the telephone pole shake against me and I started to question myself; “What the hell am I doing? This trip is pointless.” I had done a similar journey back to where I grew up years ago and it was disappointing and stupid. Back then, I was drunk and it was two in the morning. This time, it was early Sunday afternoon and it was cold and I was miserable. “I should just go back home and forget this thing”. I waited and smoked for 30 minutes for the transfer to arrive, which it did finally.
10 minutes later, I got off in my old neighborhood, changed but still the same frame. To the north of me was the river and the oh so close by woods, the wonderful woods were I forgot who I was so many hours on so many weekends oh so long ago. It was too cold to visit them and I honestly was in no mood to wander the woods alone today. I walked to the apartments.
In the parking lot, a man was in his car cleaning it with a vacuum, bright yellow cord running along the pavement from his car back to his home. Some kind of familiar Muslim music was playing inside the car as he worked. All Muslim music is familiar. There was a girls soccer team practicing in the field I used to cross to get to school. I considered watching them practice, but didn’t want to look like a pervert which I would have looked like because that is would I would have been.
“They” had replaced the doors to the place I used to live with a metal plate of shining steel that I can’t bring myself to call a door. It had a panel with buzzers for the apartments which had never been there before and it resembled the front of a walk-in freezer or gas chamber. Big bolts drilled into the concrete held this gateway secure and in place for now and forever, as if to give the impression that what you were entering was not a group of homes and families but prisoners and beyond was not meant to be seen by the general public. It disturbed me. I looked up to the third floor where I used to live and saw my old bedroom and kitchen. I saw no one in the windows and was glad I didn’t. The blinds covering the view of the insides were ripped, bent and dirty, full of ignorance and advertising the weariness that comes from living in such a place so obviously. It was time to go. I no longer belonged there and every step I took was another memory that made me feel like I was a ghost, haunting my own memories of the past and making them worse somehow. People were looking at me like I didn’t belong there and they were right.
I went to a restaurant and ate a lunch that I couldn’t afford. I noticed the debit machines are getting faster and faster to process these days as I paid for it and I got extra butter for my baked potato. I took a seat next to a window so I could watch the traffic and people and immediately regretted my choice of seat. Across the aisle from me was a family and they were talking things over while they ate. Mom and Dad were interrogating their daughter with quiet, prying questions that were worded just so as to not be blatant accusations of incompetence, but as just being conversational about the future, that is all, nothing more. I did my best to avoid understanding what they were talking about and finished my meal. I went to my third bus stop of the day and I smoked. I waited 30 minutes with three other strangers in the shelter and finally the bus came. 10 minutes later, I cross the road I was at only a little while ago and I take up shop and bus stop number 4 and begin to wait again.
A very skinny woman with the dumbest hairdo I have ever seen is with me sharing this bus shelter. She has two shopping bags with her and they are filled with bouquets of small yellow and blue plastic flowers, colourful construction paper, ribbons, scissors and other unidentified things that I am sure would fit perfectly along with these things. I dig her and imagine she is headed off somewhere today, possibly to her sister’s home to make Easter and Springtime decorations and crafts and, for one day, be the fun Aunt with her sister’s young children, both girls and both as cute as roses. As we wait, she gets a call on her cel phone and promises that she is still on her way and won’t be too much longer. She was still on the bus when I reached my destination.
The skinny woman with the flowers examined the bus schedule, then her wristwatch and then promptly left to the comfort and warmness of the coffee shop nearby. Not a good sign. I had purposefully removed my wristwatch before heading out, so the schedule was no use to me. I then was alone for a time in my own bus shelter. A different woman arrived. She looked familiar, even though I had never seen her before. She was not a skinny woman, but not what decent, right thinking society would call fat. She sat down and waited for the bus and ate what might have been the most delicious looking cheese croissant I have ever seen in front of me. She had amazing eyes. Brown and plain, but bright and alive and I stole looks at her. She commented on the lateness of the bus to me and I quickly responded in a friendly manner and then so did she. Then silence between us for 20 more minutes until the bus finally came and picked us up.
It’s windy and cold today. It’s a better off staying in bed under the covers and reading day is what today is. Almost Spring according to the calendar, but a minute away from snowing according to the clouds and temperature. I walked and smoked. I was random and that is how I wanted it today. I noticed a person waiting at a bus stop ahead of me and remembered that I had one last ticket in my wallet. It symbolized a responsible way of saving money to and from a job that no longer existed and so I decided to use it up on this used up day and turned around and walked back 100 feet and took up claim on my own personal bus stop. My own bus stop. I paced back and forth and waited 30 minutes for the bus to finally come.
After a five minute ride, I was at my transfer point and I got off and found my new stop, leaned against a telephone pole covered in twenty thousand rusted staples and waited again. The staples dug into my back and I let them. I had company at the stop this time; two people, strangers, both of them wearing their own private problems they would rather forget on shitty, cold days like this and ear bud headphones to block out everything else. We three silently agreed to ignore each other and I waited and smoked again.
The wind gusts were making the telephone pole shake against me and I started to question myself; “What the hell am I doing? This trip is pointless.” I had done a similar journey back to where I grew up years ago and it was disappointing and stupid. Back then, I was drunk and it was two in the morning. This time, it was early Sunday afternoon and it was cold and I was miserable. “I should just go back home and forget this thing”. I waited and smoked for 30 minutes for the transfer to arrive, which it did finally.
10 minutes later, I got off in my old neighborhood, changed but still the same frame. To the north of me was the river and the oh so close by woods, the wonderful woods were I forgot who I was so many hours on so many weekends oh so long ago. It was too cold to visit them and I honestly was in no mood to wander the woods alone today. I walked to the apartments.
In the parking lot, a man was in his car cleaning it with a vacuum, bright yellow cord running along the pavement from his car back to his home. Some kind of familiar Muslim music was playing inside the car as he worked. All Muslim music is familiar. There was a girls soccer team practicing in the field I used to cross to get to school. I considered watching them practice, but didn’t want to look like a pervert which I would have looked like because that is would I would have been.
“They” had replaced the doors to the place I used to live with a metal plate of shining steel that I can’t bring myself to call a door. It had a panel with buzzers for the apartments which had never been there before and it resembled the front of a walk-in freezer or gas chamber. Big bolts drilled into the concrete held this gateway secure and in place for now and forever, as if to give the impression that what you were entering was not a group of homes and families but prisoners and beyond was not meant to be seen by the general public. It disturbed me. I looked up to the third floor where I used to live and saw my old bedroom and kitchen. I saw no one in the windows and was glad I didn’t. The blinds covering the view of the insides were ripped, bent and dirty, full of ignorance and advertising the weariness that comes from living in such a place so obviously. It was time to go. I no longer belonged there and every step I took was another memory that made me feel like I was a ghost, haunting my own memories of the past and making them worse somehow. People were looking at me like I didn’t belong there and they were right.
I went to a restaurant and ate a lunch that I couldn’t afford. I noticed the debit machines are getting faster and faster to process these days as I paid for it and I got extra butter for my baked potato. I took a seat next to a window so I could watch the traffic and people and immediately regretted my choice of seat. Across the aisle from me was a family and they were talking things over while they ate. Mom and Dad were interrogating their daughter with quiet, prying questions that were worded just so as to not be blatant accusations of incompetence, but as just being conversational about the future, that is all, nothing more. I did my best to avoid understanding what they were talking about and finished my meal. I went to my third bus stop of the day and I smoked. I waited 30 minutes with three other strangers in the shelter and finally the bus came. 10 minutes later, I cross the road I was at only a little while ago and I take up shop and bus stop number 4 and begin to wait again.
A very skinny woman with the dumbest hairdo I have ever seen is with me sharing this bus shelter. She has two shopping bags with her and they are filled with bouquets of small yellow and blue plastic flowers, colourful construction paper, ribbons, scissors and other unidentified things that I am sure would fit perfectly along with these things. I dig her and imagine she is headed off somewhere today, possibly to her sister’s home to make Easter and Springtime decorations and crafts and, for one day, be the fun Aunt with her sister’s young children, both girls and both as cute as roses. As we wait, she gets a call on her cel phone and promises that she is still on her way and won’t be too much longer. She was still on the bus when I reached my destination.
The skinny woman with the flowers examined the bus schedule, then her wristwatch and then promptly left to the comfort and warmness of the coffee shop nearby. Not a good sign. I had purposefully removed my wristwatch before heading out, so the schedule was no use to me. I then was alone for a time in my own bus shelter. A different woman arrived. She looked familiar, even though I had never seen her before. She was not a skinny woman, but not what decent, right thinking society would call fat. She sat down and waited for the bus and ate what might have been the most delicious looking cheese croissant I have ever seen in front of me. She had amazing eyes. Brown and plain, but bright and alive and I stole looks at her. She commented on the lateness of the bus to me and I quickly responded in a friendly manner and then so did she. Then silence between us for 20 more minutes until the bus finally came and picked us up.
posted by apoxuponme at 7:49 PM
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