The way back home

Where the white, straight lines in the crosswalk meet the puny metal sign shivering in the cool March air, a red-and-while people-mover with windows like staring eyes rolls in. Doors open.

The doors flap like lips to take in the next group of people. The linoleum floor has been gently aged by people – old and young - scurrying around. It has seen hundreds of passengers today alone. I, of course, make myself at home in the middle and sprawl out across the back seat where I can people watch. 

“Would you like to sit?” a 30-something-year-old man questions a woman well into her 70s whose skin hangs as low as the gold chair around her neck.

“Yes, thank you,” she huffs as her smoker’s voice scratches her words.

The man shrugs and takes a different seat, higher up and toward the back.   

Doors close, and the bus glides to a start, leaving as inconspicuously as it arrived, like a butterfly fluttering from plant to plant.   

“Ding.” It comes to a quiet halt. Doors open, and its passengers exchange “Adeus,” “Llamames,” and two-sided “besos.” Doors close.

A woman dressed in black fur carrying her baby papoosed around her body takes a seat next to her husband, chatting a mile-a-minute on his Blackberry and trying to hold on to the baby stroller. It looks more like a rolling bed with a miniature-sized comforter than it does a baby stroller. Two gossipy, high-school-aged-girls strike poses as they hold onto the pole near the door. An old man hacks loogies into his never-been-washed handkerchief, after fumbling for his T-Mes. And some young punk with a faux-halk and piercings in his face sits across from me.  

“It’s Saturday. Where should we go out tonight?” one girl questions.

“I think Razzmatazz will be fun, but we’ll have to go to a bar first,” the other responds.

“Yes, that will be fun,” the first girl responds. “Tonight is the last night I can go out for the next week because I have exams and need to study.”

My deep concentration to understand their not-so-private conversation is broken. “Watch you’re purse,” the sickly old man tells me, and uses hand gestures to indicate I should move my purse to my lap. He must have seen metal-face too.  

These people are really something else, I think. This bus represents a pretty solid spectrum of Spain.

Then, a soft buzz comes almost a moment too late and the driver screeches to a stop.  Placa Catalunya. Everyone exits except for me.

And then silence. It’s me and me alone. My bottom buzzes on top of my worn plastic seat, and the monotonous chug-chug-chugging of the engine serves as my lullaby, promising to put me to sleep if the next stop in front of my front door weren’t mine.