Bus Thoughts

Realize when you get to the bus stop after 2-for-1 pasta night with a friend at the Italian Caffe (you had the gnocchi; from now on, you will always be getting the gnocchi) that you should have gone to the bathroom before you left the restaurant—shrug and cross your legs and pull your scarf up closer around your chin. It’s got dark so quickly: only 7:00 but it feels like midnight. You’re tired, always tired.

Hop on the bus, tag on with your Snapper card, find a window seat near the back. Manners Mall and Courtenay Place trundle by as you put your pink sparkly earbuds in and look out the smeary window—everyone else is on their way home from dinner too, or going to their dance class (you miss your dance class) or to their friends’ house or just stopping at New World for a new toothbrush, a litre of milk, and a kilo of feijoas since they’re in season. Muse longingly on the bok choy you got at the market yesterday afternoon, which is just going to have to wait until Tuesday to be sautéed. Consider what you should bring to work for lunch tomorrow—maybe just pita and hummus and feta cheese, since you didn’t cook tonight? People on Pig Duty are being catered for while they’re rostered but you’re beginning to be tired of all the muffins and cream puffs and pastries. You just want a nice vaguely Mediterranean sandwich, is that so wrong?

Think about work, as the bus swings out along Oriental Parade, and about how much you like striding around the office all efficiently, with a spiral bound notebook in which you write lists and then check off every item on the list. Is it wrong to be enjoying the sense of professional satisfaction H1N1 is sort of giving you? Think about residency, which should be arriving in the mail any day now. Look at the brightly lit windows of the cliffside mansions and think, again, for the hundredth, the thousandth time, about staying, about settling down. Think about curtains and couches and hot water heaters, and wonder if you’ll live alone again or if you’ll just flat for the rest of your life.

Think about your cosy little flat at the top of three flights of steps and your nice flatmates and about how burning cold it’s getting to be at night lately. Mentally review everything you could possibly wear with your new knee-high boots and calculate all the sweaters you have yet to buy. Recall your year of summer, and remember how this time last year you were getting ready to leave New Zealand and on your way to Samoa. Think about being hot in Miami, about sundresses and air conditioning and flip flops, about how you could only bear to wear jeans (at night, with open-toed shoes) when it finally got to be the middle of the Northern Hemisphere winter. Look at the skin of your hands, which seem pale and bleached all of a sudden, compared to how they looked just five months ago. Decide that you can only be truly happy–climactically speaking, of course—when it’s 95 degrees Fahrenheit and 90 percent humidity, and roll your eyes at yourself for moving (twice!) to pretty much the coldest, dampest, windiest, wettest island in the entire South Pacific. Resolve, next time, to expatriate to Vanuatu.

Think about writing while the bus negotiates the switchback to the top of the hill. Think about writing too many entries in the second person imperative that involve a lot of sentences starting with “Think about…” Think about how everything you want to write about is exactly what you don’t want to write about—who knows who’s reading? (You do: you know who’s reading. At least some of who’s reading, at least some of the time). Think about how how, when you told a friend that you spend a lot of time trying to figure out how not to write about what’s happening in your life, he said “Well, maybe you should try writing fiction then—you could write about what’s happening in someone else’s life.” Think about why you started the online journal back in 2001 and how it became, with no input or effort from you, a blog around 2004, and how now in 2009 it’s…what? An extremely verbose Twitter feed? Several paragraphs’ worth of Facebook statuses? Does anyone care? Do you care? (You do: you do care, still, eight years later, even as you’re not sure what to write about, even as you’re deciding that the very worst place to be when you really have to pee is in the back of a rumbly bus going up a steep hill).

Think of all the things you aren’t writing about but want to write about, maybe the same things that you’ll write about happening to someone completely different. Think about tea and biscuits, and about dance class again, and about how much you really really need to pee. Think about sleeping alone in a cold bed, in socks and under three blankets, and actually allow yourself to wonder, verbatim, if you’ll Ever Love Again. Laugh at yourself, kind of. Laugh at least a little. Push the buzzer for your stop, tag off, forget to get ginger nuts at the dairy, and hop and skitter along the walk that looks out over the harbour, under the stars and clouds. Put one foot in front of the other and walk on home, through the chill, through the night, through all the thoughts that crowd and cram and fight for space next to you on the bus, which is where you do most of your thinking.