Like this:

The transit doors pop open.  A pale man in his thirties walks out.  His face looks depressed but even more so, it looks weary and has the fatigue that could say, “I did not want to get out of bed this morning.”  Almost to the bus stop he hurls out a wad of spit and coughs deeply, twice.  His oversized dark brown fleece only serves to accentuate his drooping shoulders, fair skin and sandy colored hair.  I can hear his cough about seven people behind me.

Consumed with his apparent “sadness,” I stood wondering what the cause was.  Could it simply be his cough?  Did he have a rushed morning?  Did his wife forget to kiss him goodbye?  Is his sadness just a look that precedes one of his coughs?  Or am I projecting?  Do I want to see a deep sadness within him because I want to know there is someone with that connection to me?

He coughs again and I immediately wish he was not riding the bus.  I take note of my thoughts, how quickly they turn from sympathizing to criticizing him for coming into public.  How dare he cough on the bus!  Doesn’t he know that there is only so much space for air to circulate?  It’s not just paranoia about the Piggy Pox (Swine flu), I’ve caught bronchitis from riding the bus (well, it’s most likely that I did) and you don’t catch bronchitis simply from the air.  That crap has to transfer through some kind of contact. 

My imagination does me too much credit when it starts to think of the ways that germs spread on the bus.  Most of the times I refuse to think about it and I get along fine. 

Perhaps a contrasting element to my narrative, not long after the pale man, a man the same age, six feet tall (at least) and tan skin, strides out of the transit center doors with a large portfolio in hand.  Button up shirt, slacks and dress shoes, he walks with a purpose to the event center behind this pitiful line of people waiting for the bus, in the rain.

On the bus, my mind is assaulted with images of other people.  A girl, looking like a tiny doll, sits across from me in the same lime green coat I always see her in.  An older man mutters random bits about cars and his personal life to the guy sitting next to him (who has not intention of caring).  A younger man gets on at the next stop in a purple leather jacket and tries to maintain his balance (there aren’t enough seats).

I wonder where they’re going.  Did they pack a lunch like me?  Are they going to the University? Bellevue?  Do they work for Microsoft.  Oh, I hear a cough, I hope that man will be ok.  Why does every student have a North Face backpack?  She looks like a girl I used to know.  I wonder how old that man is.  Does he ever feel short?  That man looks like Richard Alpert (no joke, dark eyelashes and everything).  I’m glad this person doesn’t smell.  Gosh, it’s getting warm in here.

Then I begin to contemplate my day, my future, what time I’ll actually get to school.  There are so many people, so many thoughts, feelings and actions.  I was struck by this passage yesterday and I meant to post it anyway, but now after my morning, it seems even more fitting.

The story follows a little black girl who wishes for the blue eyes and finally receives them when she is raped by her father and goes insane.  I believe this passage speaks to me today, this morning.

 

                   “All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed.  And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us.  All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her.  We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness.  Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor.  Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent.  Her poverty kept us generous.  Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares.  And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt.  We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.

            “And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved.  We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life.  We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”

-Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

 

Just food for thought…

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