I've come to count on buses being late. I know this isn't a particularly sound habit. It's cynical. Today, I learned that it can also be destructive.
Not the kind of destructive that has you digging your fingernails into the soft skin of your inner arm on a night that sort of makes you want to stop existing. No, this is a simpler destructive. A 'there will be blisters on my feet today because these are not walking shoes and I just missed my bus' type of destructive.
Spoiler: I missed my bus today. Twice.
The first time, I could have hastened down an icy hill and caught the bus at a different stop but I decided to walk to work. I got there one minute late but no one noticed.
The second time was slightly more eventful. I was at school, editing a poster for my theatre performance next month. I left the building with plenty of time to catch my bus, according to the computer I was working on. When I stepped outside the building and checked my phone, however, I found out that it was 4:10, not 4:03. My bus was leaving. Needless to say, I was not on it.
I ran anyway. I hoped it would be late leaving. It wasn't.
There was another bus sitting at the station so I stepped on and asked the driver where the closest stop to my house was. I was semi-relieved to find that I wouldn't have to wait half an hour or walk all the way home. The bus driver asked me if I had wanted to get on the other bus and I said yes and he asked if I wanted to connect to the other bus if possible and I said that would be great. Then I sat down in my usual spot.
When we were approaching the mall, the driver made an announcement. He said that he had called the other bus driver and they were waiting for me at the next stop and that I could get off and transfer. And I just sat there, letting it wash over me that he had called the other driver and asked him to wait for me. That an entire bus full of people were waiting for me so that I could get home. Just another anonymous teenage girl who missed her bus.
So I'm sitting here thinking about losing my best friend and how sometimes a terribly broken person will go into a school and murder other human beings and how we're quickly destroying our earthly habitat and things seem pretty fucking bleak a lot of the time. But then there are my bus drivers who get me to school and work and back every day--Harold and Frank and the two whose names I don't know from today. Kind people who will wait at the mall for five minutes so that a stranger can get home. It doesn't erase all the grief but it makes it slightly more bearable.
"I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is."*
*from Paper Towns by John Green
