Or Don't

So I wrote this for an assignment, but i don't hate it... It would be nice if you didn't either, but one can't have everything i suppose.
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Start with observation. Find something unremarkable, any object that primarily exists in the background of cognition. Perhaps a deflated balloon, or a young woman’s slight mustache attracts your interest. The smell of adhesive bandages soaks in as well, wrapping up the items with a film reserved for groups of three. Try for three if you possibly can. There is safety in that number. Others numbers appear seductive. There is an authority in five, and seven has always had a surrounding mysticism. But these require constant wrangling and attention, and once they get away from you, you’re left with a dangling leash and imagery running wild. No, my dear, three Musketeers, three Blind Mice, three strikes and you’re out.  Leave it at three.

A balloon hangs in the branches of a newly barren oak tree, with two deflated companions surrounding it. You will see it as you rise in the mid morning light of November. The air will seem thin and soft, and slightly clearer than you remember. Maybe this air also holds a faint throbbing of anxiety that years of herd education has conditioned you to associate with the ending of the year and the tallying of worth. The balloon certainly won’t feel it, having no experience with public schooling. But it hangs there all the same, suspended above the ground by the same line that once prevented its escape to the sky. The irony will be lost on your eyes, still clouded with sleep, the calcified remains of product of tear ducts. Your mind will work slowly to comprehend the object; it will be primarily occupied with remembering the last fleeting images in your dream, something about trains and moss. And a girl.

The glossy teardrop shaped thing in your oak tree comes into focus slowly. Like some garnet pear, or an enormous drop of blood, whose surface tension should have been exhausted but is supernaturally resilient to the calls of physics.  It’s the color that gives its artificiality away. It will dawn on you that oak trees don’t bear jeweled fruit, and if they did it would certainly not in November. The illusion evaporates with your dream moss, and you will remember that you are a twenty-seven year old part time baggage handler, and no magical jewel bearing trees do you possess.

Technically, you don’t even possess the balloon bearing one. You rent your home from a reclusive black army vet, who has only appeared once in the two years. He fixed the washing machine and counted the Venetian blinds. Last guy, he said, took four of them. What the hell kind of person takes four sets of blinds, and leaves the other eight? You didn’t know. The rhetorical question made you uncomfortable. You tried a hesitant response. Maybe they only needed four? The hell they did, he says. They needed to buy their own damn blinds. You will wonder if sky debris falls under your expected maintenance of the house.

You will smoke your morning ritual on the front steps of the house, overlooking Samson Street. Tobacco and morning breath mingle together, and you will find some small perverse delight in the aversion your breath would cause, if there were any one to smell it. You’re not exactly a masochist, more a connoisseur of social missteps.

The city is mainly flat, so you will be able to see a great deal of it in the thin air. The number Sixteen Bus is still only a toenail-sized blob on the horizon, so you have time to brush your teeth. But you won’t. Not this day.  And when the moment comes where this matters, you will not know why you didn’t.

You can afford a car, but you don’t have any intention of purchasing one. You say you care about the environment if anyone asks. And they do, occasionally. New outgoing co-workers and dental technicians, who both essentially ask you to talk with your mouth full of fingers. Your short replies and non-responses are off-putting and rude, and you know it. Your social skills are deficient, you lack the ability to feign interest, or it never occurs to you to try. You envy those gifted with candor. But you accept your faults. That is the idea, after all.   You don’t care about the environment. You don’t believe your actions to be significant enough to make an impact either way. But the idea of owning a car is threatening and imposing, so you don’t. You ride the number Sixteen Bus twice a day, three times a week to the airport where you throw bags in and out of the bellies of planes, and watch the endless cycle of arrivals and departures.

You work in a place of transition, and the existence in the interim between this coming and going excuses you from participating. You observe the progression of others, your interpretation of their journeys acts as prosthesis for your own. You may not even notice your lack, phantom sensations from before you accepted stasis. You ride buses if you possibly can, for public transportation is a place for public introspection. Think about yourself. Think about the Indian girl across from you, on her way to the community college, Baker Street stop. Think about how your face will look to her. Think about what she might think about you.

You do, and often.  You wonder how most people you interact with see you.  What makes her different is the setting. There are unspoken rules about buses that these thoughts flout. It is considered the height of rudeness to alert any one else to their own existence. You aren’t supposed to think about anyone other than yourself and your shoes, which you should be looking at.  And you rarely break rules, written or otherwise.

You look at her surreptitiously every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Her hair is thick and dark, but cut short and evenly, making its thickness even more apparent. Thick-rimed glasses hover under dense eyebrows, resting on a deceptive nose, which appears flat from the front and pointed from her profile. Lips are naked and a darker shade of the brown of her face, both tinged with the faintest hint of purple. Above those lips lies downy hair black as the hair on her head, but thinner and softer. If the fluorescent lights of the bus weren’t so strong you probably would not have noticed it. You wonder how it would feel to stroke, your rough fingers on something so delicate. It occurs to you that if you were romantically involved, this obsession would likely appear charming, if a little idiosyncratic. But as it is your just another creep on a bus staring at a woman, hoping to go unnoticed.

             Notice her hands. The long thin fingers grip her seat with an unconcerned strength. The puffy blue vest she wears reminds you of a life jacket, reminds you of the Midwest. These poverty bearing ladies of academia always look a decade off fashion wise, no matter what they wear. Doomed to anachrony. White tube socks and Velcro fastened sneakers don’t help.

An old woman on crutches will enter the bus at Broad Street, and fumble pathetically in her oversized purse for the fare. Your seat in the handicapped reserve section is threatened.  You will have two options, up the ramp to the back of the bus, or across the aisle, next to the girl with the black velvet mustache. You will hesitate slightly as you move toward her, trying to make your movements small and deliberate.  Congratulate yourself on your audacity, your conquering of some small facet of your social timidity. You mean for your work duffel to inhabit the seat between you and the girl, a buffer for your comfort as well as hers. But the contents are unbalanced, and the works boots in cased within will cause the bag to shift towards her, and fall on her shoulder. Barely more than a tap, certainly less than a jostle, but the girl will be lost in thought, and the contact startles her. Her hands will tense on the edge of her seat, and find a corner of unburnished metal, brown skin snagging on silver hooks.

She will hold her hand to her face, close to the fuzzy downy spot, and inspect the droplets moving down her palm.  Your eyes will meet, and she will look at you full of inquisition, but not accusation. You tongue will stumble on a response, trying to apologize without breaking the first rule. Oh wow, sorry did…is that my? You will remember your breath, and try to avoid speaking directly at her. You will aim for her shoes instead.

She won’t ignore you, exactly. But she won’t respond either, she will be routing around in her canvas tote bag (ALA summer convention ’97) for something to stem the bleeding. You have over sized band-aids in your duffel. You use them for heel blisters at work. You will start digging yourself, and scoop up a few, slightly dirty from their interment in the bottom of your sack. Here, sorry. Her right sneaker turns perpendicular to your feet.

Thank you, she says, this will be much better than old notebook paper. You should laugh, but you will say to her shoes that she should be careful on this old bus, you are sure that isn’t the only hazard on here. Right, she will say, like falling duffel bags maybe? Her voice will hint at the possibility of a smile, but you wont be sure until you look into her face and see the upturned velvety corner of her mouth. You will try not to exhale your rancid breath, hold it hostage inside your throat

You should laugh or at least return the smile. You mean to, you will even think you are for a moment. But her lip straightens out and turns away from you, bandaged hand held in her lap. The tolling of the stop bell in the clear November air will bring her to her feet. She will look at your shoes for a moment before she departs, a few blocks before her usual stop. She is gracious enough to spare you the extra discomfort.

Realize your own pathetic situation. Realize that acknowledging your faults isn’t the same as fixing them. Understand that no one else is under any obligation to discern your issues, and just because you accept them doesn’t mean any one else will. Accept that you want acceptance from others as much as yourself. Try to breath out again. Think about the dripping blood and dripping balloons, and ancient cracking adhesive on the skin of a library science major. Something remarkable and endearing and never to be yours. End with an observation.