I have lived now in the same city for going on eighteen years. I have lived in this area for longer than I lived anywhere else, though I still think, thanks to the first fifteen years of my life, as that other place as the start, and this place as a city where I’m an interloper. In that time, I’ve consistantly caught public transport. My first nervous, awkward hoisting onto the bus, terrified that I may say the wrong thing to the driver, that I may wind up on the far side of the moon somehow.
Showing bus drivers my school pass. Then nothing, as I gave them cash. Then a concession card. Then nothing, as I gave them cash. That awkward tangle of employed-unemployed-employed-unemployed, oh-fuck-it-that’ll-do. My first time going to university, handing over a handful of change, choking in my throat and wondering if this new route would take me to the right place, would anyone see me as a fraud. Buses and trains, handfuls of change.
Nowadays, we have a thing called the Opal card. It’s a little card that tracks my account, and I wave it over the bus reader and it charges my account. I’ve had it for a bit over a year. It’s wonderful.
In this regular travel, across this time, I have seen, without really thinking about it, stories. The same cache of people, moving back and forth in the same circles, slowly turning around and around the drain of the gong. The redhead, convinced he was a super genius, trying to talk about how great he was to drivers, who routinely, when he got off, commented on what a wanker he was. That story that was punctuated in the middle by him spouting racist invective on a bus, only to get the bus pulled over and get thrown off before the two blokes he was upsetting got out of the chairs to work out their emotional issues. The gentle fellow with the beret, whose beard I watched grow longer and longer, enjoying his retirement. The big fellow who chatted to me time to time, who I’ve watched slowly shrink, once taking up three seats and now taking up one and a half.
All these stories I brush.
I thought about one today. A girl I used to catch the bus with, who I thought about today, because I saw her and hadn’t in a while. I remembered seeing her getting off the bus stop when I was in high school, in a different school’s uniform. I remembered seeing getting on as I got off from the TAFE stop, books under her arms. I saw her late at night, getting a bus home from the pub with… I think her mother. Her getting a pram onto the bus, with her mum. The two kids in the big double decker pram. Seeing her going to the doctors as I went to work. Seeing her and her mother fighting on the bus. Seeing the pram only with one kid in it. Seeing the pram disappear. Seeing her, without her mother. Seeing her mother, moving around the town with a pram. Seeing them together again, years later. Fewer fights. The mother at the doctor’s. Both of them together getting on the bus by the pet store.
I saw her today, and made eye contact and smiled, because though we don’t know each other’s names or anything about one another, we’ve seen each other a lot. She smiled back at me, up from her wheelchair.
We were in the middle of the crossing road, so I didn’t stop to say hello. I feel like I should have. But she was going one way, I was going the other, and our paths crossed.I had to catch my bus.