Bird As Fish

How to describe to you the importance of the Nights of Buses? It is most likely impossible. There are the physical sensations that I cannot forget - the aching cold, harsh lights, moist frozen air, raw hands and distressed back.

I tried to be brave in those Nights of Buses, but there was nothing to fight against. How can one fight against something that surrounds you? How can one fight the cold that pervades the entire body and sends foreign shivers up your neck? How can one fight the fear of something that is already upon you? Bravery does nothing.

But I learned to keep a stiff back, never bow, iron lips, never cry, watch everything, never sleep, keep everything under control.

Nights of Buses represents the time when I should, rightfully as a child, be sleeping in a bed. We none of us have any rights on a bus. Meshed together with crazy women and pornographic men, the only respite is in the washroom, where the smell of cigarette smoke still lingers. Bus seats are restless and dead after many hours, but at the end of the line, where will you go? Bus terminals, where all the homeless sleep, and I shall join them. Terminal cancer, terminal end. It is the end. Buses at least stave off the inevitable end. They bring you closer to where you least want to be, but give you a place to be for a while. I never wanted to get off a bus. I dreaded the sudden slow movement of city driving and seeing signs of a destination and the overly hot air of artificial procrastination becoming the all too cold strike of reality across the face.

Where will I go now? Where can I exist at any level? Don't look me in the eyes I won't answer you. Don't talk to me, I'll lie. But I know what I really need. I need a bed to sleep in, that is warm, that I won't have to leave tomorrow, where Nights of Buses will be but a forgotten nightmare.

© 2003 All rights reserved MJ Jackson
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