The Bus to Nowhere

“I want to give up my bearings, slip out of who I am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

The Christmas lights are fading, half-made-up trees on the verge of being completely disassembled and stored away in dark shelves and rooms until their time comes again. Festive smiles dwindle into monotonic masks and the music withers out slowly.

But people – they remain the same. The same daily commuters, the same drivers and conductors walk these aisles; this coincidental set of passengers are strangers who’re family for the brief commute where they always come together.

It’s a curious feeling of kinship in the bus – where we fall together, give up seats to complete strangers, make way for someone to get down when there is no space for a single foot, hold their bags so they can stand without it burdening them; but most of all – it’s the overwhelming trust we place in those around us, a sense of trust that disintegrates the moment we step off the bus and start eyeing people with anxious, distrustful glances.

Yes, it’s a very curious kinship.

But I want to get off this bus. This bus that’ll reach its destination – come hail or snow. This bus where everyone’s got the need to be somewhere and is fidgety about it, where most of us are riddled with anxiety, exhausted by the mere thought of having to return the same way in the evening. It’s not the city noise or the angry drivers whose honks speak for them. No, it isn’t the roads that look so miserable with their broken corners and large holes either. It’s the monotony of the routine.

It’s the torture of consuming words and ideas that are not your own, words that speak of gorgeous worlds and friendships, worlds so immersed in magic where adventures abound in every corner and finding that all the while, we are trapped in this strange loop of life we’ve chosen for ourselves – too afraid to run away, too doubtful to try that new thing, apprehensive of how our reckless choices will affect those around us or if they will, at all.

I want to get on a bus to nowhere. I want to meet a new set of strangers – all of us lost trying to find our way. A bus where no one’s annoyed or afraid, where everyone just finds the silence to be the most polite and beautiful thing ever, where the music in our ears shuts off life’s noise and the city’s screams and we’re all just held in that moment of forced peace and thrilling anxiety. And as the bus to nowhere traverses unknown paths, none of us will be afraid. We’ll stare out the windows, at the little stalls on the side, caught between towering malls and banks and find a story in every nook and cranny.

I want to get on a bus to nowhere. It would be a journey of discovery with people who are strangers and kin simultaneously. When we’re well and truly lost, maybe we’ll discover there was no path to find all along because we were rewriting ours every day.

“There is nothing more to be said or to be done tonight, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellowmen.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Five Orange Pips

(featured image by Anders Jildén on Unsplash)

Happy new year, friends! I had to go on an impromptu hiatus but I’m hopefully back and can’t wait to get back to writing more!
I wish you all a fantastic new year and hope it’s your best year yet!❤️

Thoughtfully yours,
D

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