I was on the bus.   Not a bus, the bus.   I was on the bus in the city and sitting next to the man that is always on the bus.   Or woman.   Half asleep, folded over in garbage bag protection- cracked old garments in layers holding him up, plastic bags filled with very important things, very important things, all he has really next to him.   He's been traveling this bus for hours, hours now and I just got on.  

            I got on.   I had a back pack full of books.   Very important books, the knowledge the old words that I carry around through the day, well sometimes they make my back hurt with their weight and I have to have my mom or if I'm lucky enough to be dating someone at the time, well have them crack it for all the weight that the old words have on my back.   And I carry them around with me, like I was a library myself, and crack them open one by one, hearing the snap of the binding or the falling of pages like leaves if they are old and worn by dead one's fingers, but opening them one by one slowly in subways restaurants, diners, you could say avoiding people, but nonetheless, I open them and why and what for this illusion of   knowledge?   I know I am being stupid, bag of books, but either way, there I was stupid and on the bus sitting next to the always man of folded newspapers for warmth and lining the soles of his shoes.

            We each know him quite well.

            And of course, we weren't the only ones on the bus, seeing that it was almost rush hour and the bus, not a bus but the, was becoming congested with sensible shoes and golden streaked hair up in French twists.   With more folded newspapers in the hands of white-knuckled men with their rings and mothers from the suburbs with shopping bags and a couple of chocolate kids with earphones electrifying their giggles and lingo as they hip and hopped their way about their seats.   High fives and necks moving like they had hula-hoops about them, blushing girls and plaid skirts and a woman my age, holding her purse tightly with coral fingernails and looking out the window to the scenery that melted faces and storefronts and café's and cyclists passing us and it was just another day on the bus for all of us.   Old women, so old that they shouldn't have to travel on the bus, with varicose veins bulging and hairstyles that their dead husbands would still love and lips pursed tight and sometimes kind eyes and sometimes the people on the bus notice her and are kind also and let her sit- jump up with young legs and motion with hands the old women will never again see.   Sometimes there is kindness within this steel contraption that is moving almost seamless through the late afternoon.   The backdrop of skyscrapers pushing us in the right direction as we leave behind where we've been and pay the dollar fifty for where we're going.

            There is one father at the helm of all of this.   The bus driver is nameless and faceless today, and that is best, because if there were any adjective you could attatch, male or female even- well then what happened would have been tried to been explained.   I don't even quite remember a bus driver.   My dollar fifty ready from change of whatever I had just bought- a coca-cola?   Some coffee?   It's best to assume caffeine in liquid form.   That probably was my purchase.   But it gave me enough that with the push of the people behind me, I didn't even quite realize or remember who steered the bus toward what was my rented home.

            It was spring.   Far enough from winter that we shouldn't be cold or clutching or coats at the necks, but it was Chicago so we were and we weren't questioning it for a moment.   The weather was nothing to argue with or rationalize.   Before it was because it was Chicago and we could shake our heads at that alone, but then also because it was the 21 st century and all bets were off.

            I'm looking out the window too, past the folded man and holding my nose with imaginary fingers because he brings everything with him, all of his senses.   And urine and old shit stains aren't an embarrassment to him, never were, they're just more luggage, and possibly extra protection to keep people from assuming that he's people too and trying to start a logical conversation, which he had figured out long ago, was never going to happen.

            So I'm staring, at what's left of the trees, of how the sky is beginning to blush, and how the wind affects all of us in different ways.   Some women pull their hair back, other's let it fly free and wild like a controlled ocean.   Men that pull their baseball caps down lower and look up in casual defiance, old men that stumble into doorways, holding canes.   People talking louder on their cell phones.   Dogs with tongues trying to catch it all.   The way the wind hits us is just another way to see personality through motions.

            And then, with my fingers lightly resting on my lap, there is a jolt.   There is a jump that sends us all raucously forward, jutting, trying not to hit each other, grabbing steel poles and parts of the seats that we have been avoiding.   Inadvertantly touching knees, a release of everything we didn't want to touch but now had to to save our balance is what happened.   Empty Gatorade bottles rolled down the aisles, a woman with black hair up in a bun, a short skirt and business suit, briefcase, painted lips, lost her high-heeled footing, clutched on the lapel of a man she never knew.   The old women felt it in their veins, blood rushing where it was beginning to solidify, as if nature broke the freeze.   The headphones fell from the bouncing teenagers metal hooped ear-lobes,   and rested gently around slender necks, blaring loud hip hop through black padding and becoming the back drop for the shocked human cargo.

            A woman towards the front screamed.   A loud high pitched eagle pierce, that tore towards the back like a rip in the air.   The bus driver, whose face I'll never remember, but whose mouth I saw unhinged and dropped in chapped lips exposing handfuls of exposed cavities and metal fillings.   Their eyes, somehow I know were brown, or blue, filling with the scene- finally open and seeing as they'd been concentrating on the tv reality that their daily route afforded them.   Knuckles light brown, or skeletal white, and exposed, clenching a rubber lined wheel, black shoes bought especially for the job too late on a brake that other nameless bus drivers had punched in time with years of disconnected feet of those who exhaust their way down Clark street for nine hours at a time in a means to keep on living in what we hope is pure air.   The crease in their uniform snapping into broken lines with the weight of inertia.   The slow moan of their stomach as their future lay in front of them in the form of a now fallen girl.

            I did not know this yet, but I knew.   She was blonde and the past tense was already in affect as we all knew, our throats suddenly silent but wanting to say- our eyes question marks of different colors with exclamation point pupils.   Our hair fallen from where we'd placed it.  

            A silence.   The type that accompanies shock, the type that a mother feels when her body stretches itself for nine months only to birth something dead and limp.   Even in the back we knew her face, her age.   We shouldn't have.   It should've been like the jolt of confusion that is felt when the bus jumps to avoid a cyclist with a heart full of adrenaline who swerves in front of all those who paid for the same trip, but cramped.   Or the sudden thrust forward from when the new bus driver decides at the last minute that the yellow isn't worth it, that they're going to have to drive all day till paycheck anyway- they've got nowhere to go except this seat for the rest of the day, and the curses of craned necks and reenacted whip-lash of passengers too quick to comment and too slow to understand.   It should have been something we all questioned.   The why?   We should have questioned the idiocy that brought us jumping from the dreams we had created. But we felt the bump.   In our own silent ways, days later we will recall how we each, individually felt the body break beneath us.   And quietly know that anonymous mortality is something that, for a second, made us all shift, momentarily, from our paid theatre seats.