New York Part 2: Between Here and There

I took the Bus to New York City. It was a strange impulse. I could've flown, not expensively, from Buffalo. That one time I went in high school we took the bus and I didn't find it completely awful, although I couldn't sleep on the overnight trip the way back. So the bus had familiarity. I spoke with one of my brothers later (the one who didn't go) that it was a balancing act of time, money, convenience and comfort. Next time I go I might fly.

But I figured, the travel is part of the trip. By taking an overnight bus there I avoid getting up early the next day and finding my way to an airport and devoting a whole day to travel. If I play it smart I'm on easy street: put my bags on the bus, stare out the window for 11 hours, nod off if I'm lucky, and then suddenly I'm at my destination.

The last time I took the overnight bus, when I was on my trip in high school, I was keeping a journal. I was in a writer's craft class and we had to do three a week and I was charged with keeping track of my thoughts on the trip since I wouldn't be in class. Except I had no time at the end of each day to sit down and write, so I did it all on the bus back, in increasingly shaky, sleep deprived scrawl and disjointed rambling prose (even worse than this!) I was keeping a blog at the time, but I skipped blogging about it, so now that scatterbrained, illegible journal is my only written record of that first trip. And I'm notorious for my bad memory even of my own life. At least, the bits I don't write down.

I didn't intend to sleep on the ride over. Not soundly, not all the way. I wasn't going to take a pill and drift off by any means. I wanted to savor it. To test myself. To crawl into this dark corner with a book and some music and trance out. I haven't had a lot of time lately to be alone with my music. I didn't listen to anything twice while I was down there, except one CD I intend to review soon.

If I was writing a comedy article, I'd say here's where things went all wrong. My iPod wasn't charged, my seatmate was a fat Albanian who wanted to talk and share his goulash. The bus broke down and I had to help push. Then my coffee caught up with me and I had to actually use the toilet on the bus!! Hilarious over-the-top Zack Galafianakis-type disasters.

But no. It was as mellow and serene as I could ever imagine. I read. I listened to quiet, darkened music apt for the setting. I stared blankly out the window. I wrote bad poetry on my new phone. I even slept a bit.

There's this thing called quantum entanglement or something (I just Wiki'd that phrase and found something unrelated, so I don't know.) Whatever it is, it's a theory, probably not very scientific but what do I know, that any two objects that have interacted have that much chance of interacting again. A woman saves a child's life, that child grows up to save hers: true story, according to William Shatner's show.

It's late. We've crossed the border and I'm done using the bus' WiFi to post on Facebook about how I'm somewhere in the darkness. At the Buffalo airport people get on. The seat next to me had been unoccupied. A couple boards, and can only find seats apart. I don't want to go sit next to one of the other people already there, so they have to split up. The girl sits next to me, her boyfriend a row up across the aisle.

As soon as we get moving again, she nods off. She has a neck pillow but she isn't using it. She's thin, her neck is slender and angled away from me. You can probably surmise from my posts -- sad as it is to be admitting it this way -- I haven't been near a sleeping woman in a ridiculously long time. I just enjoy the sight. Every so often she slopes inward toward me and my mind thinks it's an overture, but she wakes up and corrects herself. At one point I nodded off and woke up, noticed we had sloped in together and I think, how about that? My body's better off without me. By this point she was using the neck pillow so I was less interested in looking, because that's a bit less sexy, isn't it? Plush animal wrapped around your neck.

We barely said a word except when she sneezed and I said gesundheit. People like it when someone says gesundheit. It's a little less godly than "bless you." Funny word. If you take the time to say it, it's charming.

Finally, after one stop, people shifted and a pair of seats opened up. We shared a laugh at the awkwardness of napping next to a total stranger for hours on end before she moved over with her guy. The two of us could've done a lot worse. I was happy to have a bit more leg room after that. It was about 6 AM on Friday and we were at a gas station outside Scranton. I didn't buy anything to eat, only a map of the 5 boroughs because I wasn't sure if I'd be able to get Google Maps on my fancy new phone down there and didn't want to have to bother.

Sunday morning I am finally boarding my bus back to Toronto. I get on sooner than I had before and have virtually my pick of seats. I choose one a row up from where I'd been sitting. It was on the upper level of the double decker bus, overlooking the back stairs, meaning I had the advantage now of not sitting behind someone. A kind of bonus legroom.

As others board, I peer over the railing and notice, right in the row in my eyeline, is a vaguely familiar looking back-of-a-guy's-head. And sitting next to him is a cute, thin girl with glasses and a neck pillow. They could've been sitting anywhere on the lower level and I would not have noticed them. Until, I guess, we got off at a rest stop. Two and a half days is such a strange duration to be in New York: more than a weekend, less than a vacation. Reappearance seems unlikely, but there they were.

We got off at the rest stop and they were ahead of me in line for coffee. I wanted to tap her on the shoulder and say "Hey, remember when we slept together?" But I decided to leave well enough alone. Maybe they saw me. Maybe not. Best case scenario I say something and they offer a three-way, but I just wasn't up for it after that much travel.

As the sun set over upstate New York and we barreled toward the border, I thought about how everything on this trip was routes rather than destinations.

Keep on rockin
-Scotto