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put your troubles down, no need to bear the weight
There are a surprising number of people on the 10 o'clock bus to Montreal on a Monday morning. More than half the seats are filled.
Travelling by bus, in a window seat with an empty seat next to me, on a sunny day, is I think one of my favourite things in the world. It feels very purposeful, and yet freeing. There is a destination, but getting there is someone else's burden. It feels like floating in the wind, waiting for it to deposit you where it will. It is like a moment of limbo in life, in between two concrete locations and experiences. For the duration of the trip there are no attachments or responsibilities. There is nothing that needs immediate attention or worry. And that is an unbelievably liberating feeling.
Somehow, being in transit allows me not to worry. It's not that I "forget" my worries, as the cliche goes, because I am fairly aware of the things that I am likely to worry about later (what it was exactly that I did wrong for that project I was working on that my manager said she would explain to me but then apparently forgot to last week and whether it is worth bringing it up or not), or that I was worrying about earlier (whether I should explain to my mother where it was that I went on Sunday morning, which was to the Waterville cemetery, so that she would stop asking me cryptic questions, or whether such an explanation would make it more uncomfortable, as it did when my father asked in the car on our way back from the mall and when I told him he didn't say anything else for almost the rest of the way home and until he asked me when Sunday shopping became normal and I said, when they changed the law? And then I babbled about how there is still no Sunday shopping in Nova Scotia because I was relieved, but also I didn't want to go back to the oppressive silence.) But since it is next to impossible for me to do anything about them right this second, I am somehow miraculously able to calm my mind to a degree that I otherwise achieve only by sleeping, on the nights I have good dreams. Which doesn't happen all that often. Especially lately. By which I mean in the last several years.
Someone once described to me the effect of morphine in this way: you can still feel the pain, but you no longer care about it. Not so much numbness as indifference. This is how I feel on the bus. The things that make me anxious every other second of my life don't matter here. They aren't relevant. They just don't apply to this time and place because I am not in a time and place. I am moving from one situation toward another situation, but until I get there my time is only my own and I can do whatever I want with it, and what I want to do is read and listen to music and think about my sister and the goldfish she will maybe get this week and name Marmalade. And so I do. And I'm happy.
Then I see the Montreal skyline up ahead and I think, uh-oh. Time to start worrying again.
In the city, we drive past a house. The entire south side of the roof is covered in pigeons, nesting in the sun, and I think it's beautiful and feel strangely attracted to it, although I don't understand why, since normally I hate pigeons.
I think there should be a rule about getting off the bus which would be that the people sitting at the back of the bus have to wait for the people sitting in front of them to get off first, unless those people are not making any obvious attempt to stand up and edge into the aisle. I don't mind waiting my turn, but I hate waiting in my seat in that half-sitting-half-standing position while people who were sitting behind me push past as though they can't stand to be on the bus one second longer than they absolutely have to now that it is stationary or they are late for some emergency or are way too important to be courteous and let me out. People, sitting in the back of the bus is a choice. You should not make this choice unless you can handle the responsibility that goes with it. Stop. Shoving.
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"The mind of the thoroughly well informed [person] is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, and everything priced above its proper value."
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