A Meditation on the Diaphanous Nature of Transit and Transition, in Five Parts

I.

When I was younger, maybe six or seven, any car trip over four hours in duration was preceded, on my part, by roughly the same amount of preparation as goes into waging a small-scale war. The back seat of the family station wagon became a veritable bomb shelter, stocked with several lunch’s worth of food, a pillow in case I needed to sleep, several Nancy Drew books, and enough candy to send an entire kindergarten class into an insulin coma. All that was missing were canned goods and a gas mask — though, given my then-ten-year-old brother’s predilection for loudly announcing his flatulence, perhaps the gas mask would have been a good idea. Now, a seasoned traveler, I put decidedly less effort into getting ready for one of my routine treks between Ithaca and New York City: I make a sandwich and get on the bus, where I proceed to sit and stare out the window for the next five to six hours, all my worldly possessions in a knapsack clutched between my knees.

II.

I think — or at least I hope — that I am not the only person who, while waiting for everyone to board the bus, entertains thoughts that some uniquely attractive traveler will sit next to me and that, as the tales of our lives unfold, we will discover that we are fated to be together. It’s not a notion I expect to be realized, but as I twist in my seat and look out the window at my future fellow commuters loading their luggage into the bus’s underbelly, I find myself thinking, “Could that be him? I expected him to have glasses. Could that be him?” As person after person passes the empty seat next to mine, it becomes clear that the answer is, simply, “No.” I inevitably wind up sitting next to a middle-aged woman, which isn’t a bad thing; they don’t take up much space and usually keep to themselves.

III.

It’s hard not to feel offended when people pass up the opportunity to sit next to me, though I understand that everyone instinctively thinks, upon boarding a crowded bus, that despite the fact that pretty much everyone is sitting next to someone, surely there is an empty pair of seats somewhere in the back that everyone else has overlooked. It’s their loss, as I am quite possibly the best seatmate one could have, if I do say so myself; I’m tiny, I shower on a regular basis, and I never attempt to form five-hour friendships that consist solely of banal small-talk of the “where are you from?” “what’s your major?” variety. I’m such a good seatmate that when someone falls asleep and starts leaning on me, his head dangling dangerously close to my shoulder, rather than being annoyed I feel sorry for him, because when he wakes up he’ll feel bad about encroaching on a stranger’s precious personal space. I start brainstorming ways to keep him from feeling guilty: should I pretend to be asleep as well, so he thinks I didn’t notice?

IV.

I find that the bus ride back to Ithaca is always infinitely more pleasant than the ride down to NYC. Everyone is so much more refreshed after a vacation; the bus leaving Ithaca at the start of the break, on the other hand, is always tainted with palpable desperation. This break I made the mistake of taking the 4:30 a.m. bus home on Thursday night — I say Thursday night rather than Friday morning because I didn’t sleep beforehand, and I say mistake because the bus was full of likeminded individuals who had to spend Thursday evening at Cornell for one reason or another but were so frantic to get out of Ithaca that they were willing to take the earliest bus possible.

As we all waited by Baker Flagpole in the cold, our breath forming bright white clouds against the inky darkness, we began talking amongst ourselves; we whispered and giggled like co-conspirators. Something about standing there together at such an unlikely hour, the sidewalks empty except for a lone drunk weaving down the Slope, made us feel like old friends. Then the bus arrived and we became strangers again; I found a seat and settled into a dismal, eternal Thursday that would engulf my entire weekend.

V.

Though I haven’t been many places, I like to think that in my well-worn route between home and school my dirt-streaked bus window becomes a filmstrip documentary about America. As the bus shudders and heaves its mass out of the steel bowels of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, I am greeted by the tangled mess of screaming billboards that is Times Square; the yellow womb of the Lincoln tunnel; a view of the Manhattan skyline, buildings stacked like boxes.

Then it’s on to the strip malls of New Jersey, where the sun glints off endless parking lots tiled with cars. We pick up speed as we enter rural Pennsylvania, passing reeded ponds, huge pools of stagnant water, trailer homes by the highway and mansions on mountaintops, fields plowed into corduroy ridges, abandoned construction sites flanked by dozens of porta-potties lined up like soldiers. This is America, this mixture of dirt and sun and money, and when the clock tower comes into view, I know I’m home.