Take the Bus Home

I can always go back. I can never go back. I can go back but I’ll end up at a bowling alley watching my former roommate snort crushed pills in the parking lot. I’ll go to the restroom and when I return, I won’t touch my beer, left to sweat on the table in my absence, just in case. I can’t get back because I’m afraid of flying. I can get back, but I’ll have to take the bus. The Old Dog, another passenger calls it. Boulder to Phoenix via Denver to Colorado Springs, Albuquerque, Grants, Gallup, Holbrook, Flagstaff. This will be good for you, my dad says, to watch the land go by from the bus window as you pass over it. I count the miles as the landscape shifts from evergreen to dust. I absorb how far I’ve gone from home and how far I have yet to go. Carry a map even though I’m not navigating. Measure the distance in pre-packaged gas station sandwiches until my stomach howls, until it hurts to shift my arms and legs, until I submit to the seat. I’m fine with never leaving the confines of this bus. Hug my backpack to my body as I sleep so no one steals it. I can arrive safely if I remain constantly, painfully aware. Accept food from neither of the men who offer it. Look away from the man who boards with the unbuttoned white shirt, his chest hair and heart surgery scar and smile all showing teeth. Look away from the dead worm wedged into the fabric of the seat I face for half the trip. Did it get stuck there to die, was it almost home? Most of the journey passes in the darkness of night, and feels to primarily take place in New Mexico, even though that’s not possible. Overnight, each person claims two seats or a row to themselves, seat-beds, legs flung over armrests, armrests jammed into spines as if our bodies can never fully unplug from the infrastructure of the rolling tube. Some play cards. The interior fills with pale mustard light. The world outside the windows is snuffed by a pitch-black blanket, the darkest dark. All I know is the inside of the bus. The bus careens down the road, a moment away from spinning out of control and over the side of a mountain road. The driver lets on single passengers at random spots in a tiny town, by stop signs, on the side of the freeway. He catches up with his new friends and laughs as if he is not singularly responsible for the lives and possible deaths of several sleeping passengers. I pass the dark hours clutching a plastic pig-shaped flashlight, a toy, its dim rays the sole beacon of optimism illuminating the pages of a book I don’t care to read, my hand-held tie to reality, to the morning that will hopefully arrive. At dawn, I’m in Albuquerque. Halfway home. Too far along to turn back.