Bus

Eventually I get sick of driving around and being lost. That’s when I just park at a street corner and turn off my car, already feeling the cool wisps snake their way through the cracks and wrap around my body, and when I whip off my seatbelt and throw open the door, the blistering freeze is enough to knock me over. Wearing just a hoodie was a stupid idea and I’m realizing that in full now.

There’s no turning back now, though. When I look around, I realize I’m not as lost as I thought I was – I’m at the entrance of the city that I’d only been at a few times before when I was younger. The suburbs aren’t too far from here; my old house probably is still standing a few miles down the road.

I stretch my legs and glance at my surroundings, feeling so foreign, like some kind of tourist who’s not even on vacation, really.

That’s when it starts to snow.

It sounds straight out of a movie, I know. Right when I look up at the sky, little white snowflakes start to shimmer as they glide to the ground, landing in my hair and on my shoulders, laying so softly on the concrete under my feet. Crystals form on the windshield of my car, fogging it up so much that I’m sure I’ll have to use my stupid ice scraper when I get back in. I contemplate going back in my car and driving off somewhere else so that I can just deal with it now, but I decide against it.

What a shit car. The only thing it’s done for me in this whole ordeal was drive me. It didn’t even do it automatically – I’m the one behind the wheel, controlling it. It doesn’t have a GPS system that prevents me from getting lost in a city I once might have known so well, the air conditioning and heater are broken as hell, the whole thing squeaks when I go over curbs. The fuel economy is shit. The stupid thing is older than the kids on my bus.

I turn around and start walking down the sidewalk, trying not to think about how I never thought about that thing dying on me on the way here. It’s a miracle that it survived, really. I’m always expecting it to just cough up some smoke and prompt me to take it to the junkyard.

Really…there’s nothing keeping me from buying a new car. I could probably afford a decent one, maybe a little truck or something rather than a dinky little sedan. Why the hell do I keep that thing around when all it does is its job? I probably deserve something that didn’t belong to my dead mom when she was sane enough to drive.

I don’t spend a ton of money on groceries, rent isn’t terrible, and I haven’t bought a new piece of technology since my laptop in 2008. I guess I don’t really have a right to complain about my stupid car when I’m doing nothing to improve it or my own of transportation overall. Maybe I’m just being dumb and sentimental. It really is one of the only physical manifestations of my parents and my memories of them, after all. It’s gone on living long after they have.

The frosted air numbs my lungs and it’s not long before I lose the feeling in my face. I can’t tell if my mouth is open or closed, and the fact that I’m unintentionally walking faster and faster has got to look strange to anybody who’s actually looking at me, so I eye a nearby bench and just take a seat on it, the cold metal freezing my ass.

I pull my SkyPod out of my pocket and end up thumbing through songs I don’t even want to listen to. I don’t really mind it at the moment; it’s all just background noise more than anything.

What the hell am I even doing here?

I drove almost 2,000 miles here and I’m literally just a sitting duck. There’s gotta be another reason other than ‘Oh, I’m a loser and I’m pathetic, wah wah, I deal with my problems by running away from them.’

I sigh and the air from my lungs chills into a snaky vapor, lifting into the sky.

It would be so goddamn easy for me to just move back to Duluth.

There’s nothing stopping me from doing it. I’m a fucking adult. All I would need to do is quit my stupid-ass job, talk with my landlord, gather all my shit and load it into my tiny metal deathtrap, find an apartment here, and then just drive on back. Easy as shit. Do you realize how much closer I’d be to Carrie? I’d only be halfway across the country rather than being all the way across the USA. I’d be living in a place that raised me, that sprouted me. I could know what it’s like to be an adult here. I could see things from my parents’ point of view rather than just not knowing about them at all.

I could finally maybe know what Duluth did wrong to me and maybe I could fix it. I’m smart enough to know when things are going wrong and I’m a decent enough person to know how to turn it around, aren’t I? I mean, I’m still living. I’m still a human being, still on planet Earth. I’m not six feet under like nearly everybody in my whole family. I gotta be doing something right.

That’s it. I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna go back to Yuma for a day, tops, sort everything out and not let anybody know that I’m in town, and then I’m gonna make the thirty-hour drive back up here. It can’t be too hard to find an apartment here. I’m in a city, for Christ’s sake. I can afford rent, no problems there. I won’t have to deal with those stupid kids ever again, I won’t have to see Mercedes for the rest of my life, I won’t feel like I’m constantly trapped in a dead-end job alongside people who are twenty years older than I am, making me feel like I’m wasting the little youth I have in me.

It’s not quite a blank canvas. It’s an old one that’s been painted on in the past, shades of red and blue, and right now I’m painting over it with a bright white. It’s been used, but I can make it work. I know I can. There’s nothing that keeps me bound to Duluth other than my background, but anything sounds better than Yuma right now – and why not go back to a place I kind of know?

I keep ruminating these plans over and over in my head. It feels like the more I do it, the more it feels like I’m actually gonna do it – and I never do anything. I tell myself to get friends, to get a better job, to go out and jog around the neighborhood, and yet this feels realer to me than anything that I’ve ever seen.

But then I stop thinking about it. There’s a horrible feeling rumbling in my gut, and it intensifies, and I realize that I’m listening to my favorite Yes song and Jon Anderson is telling me not to surround myself with myself.

I don’t do anything. I’ve never stood out as a person, I’m not an outstanding human being – hell, half the time I question my own humanity – and when it comes to being a stubborn and lazy asshole, the only thing I am is a pushover disguised with some sort of asshole front.

I can’t do this.

There’s no way.

The only reason I moved out to Yuma was because I had someone there. And even if they were killed immediately after we had a spark, I couldn’t have gone back to Minnesota. I was 2,000 miles away from home and never once did I consider going back and just finding a place to stay in the city, maybe finding a job at the port or something, sticking close to the few family members I had left.

I never wanted to go back to Duluth. There was nothing that kept me bound there. In fact, I’ve always wanted to run away from there and stay as far away as possible. There are too many ghosts here, too many bad memories and bad reminders that I’m alone. Even Carrie had found her wings right out of high school.

I would be the biggest coward if I moved back here. I’m a fucking baby. I can’t handle actual legitimate discomfort so I just run the fuck away, back to a place I hate even more than I hate Yuma. I walked out on the only person in years who has actually given two shits about me. Mercedes is probably either fed up with me beyond belief – which I totally understand – or she’s worried sick, though I wouldn’t know why.

I’m being more of an annoying asshole to the kids on the bus than they have ever been to me. They’re probably under the iron fist of some dickhead substitute driver who makes them wear seatbelts, and of course they’re probably gonna rebel, and of course nothing good is going to come out of that. I like to think I’m lenient. They don’t think I am, but I could be way worse.

I bury my face in my hand, my free hand that’s not holding my mp3 player, and I think about the shit that I’m probably causing back there. I’m a selfish person and I’ve always known it, and I know that I’m looking way too into this, that there’s probably just a tiny little ripple in their lives, a negligible stepping stone from me not being there. Yet here I am, groaning over how I took a fucking week off from work and I didn’t even wait around to find out if I got time off – and God knows if I skipped out without approval, my ass is gonna be shitcanned.

I’ve had a rough past few days.

I complain so fucking much about my whole life and all of the shit that the universe has bestowed upon my shoulders, and yet here I am, perfectly able-bodied with a secure job, with a sister who would do anything for me and with a strained friendship that could probably survive if I act fast. There are literally at least three people in my life who would maybe cry and come to my funeral if I died today. That probably doesn’t mean a lot to you. For me, living my life alone and with no strings attached to anywhere I go or anything I do, it means the world. My biggest fear is croaking and having an empty funeral. At least at the moment, I know one person for certain would come – Carrie. I couldn’t say the same a year ago.

I have never taken anybody’s kindness to heart. I have never seen goodness in anybody, and I focus on everybody’s negatives because that’s what stands out to me, it’s what I’m used to, and it’s what I’m made of – pitfalls. As long as I convince myself that somebody is a shitty person, I don’t feel so shitty about myself. That is my philosophy. It’s worked for years and it’s gotten me this far, and it’s the reason why I’m sitting on a freezing bench in Duluth, Minnesota, contemplating my whole life and how much of a failure I am, how stupid I am for driving almost 2,000 miles without a concrete purpose in mind.

Even the fucking brats that ride my bus don’t bitch at the world as often as I do. They bitch at each other sometimes, but there’s always something between them that keeps them bound to one another. Maybe it’s the fact that they share an age, or the fact that they’re all going through the worst two years of anybody’s life together. Camaraderie, you know? It makes my heart hurt thinking about it. Wishing I could’ve had that kind of group agreement that even if you make fun of a kid because he smells funny, you’d stick up for him in a heartbeat if some high school dickbag made fun of him for the same reason.

They’ve all probably got strings in Yuma, their own little webs that keep them bound, whether it’s their families or each other. They’ll likely go off to college in some other state and look back on their upbringing in Arizona and think about how shitty it was. I want to know if any of them are ever gonna be dumb enough to drive halfway across the country, realize that they did the wrong thing, and come back crying about how unfair the world is.

I can’t live here. Duluth isn’t for me. There may not have been a reason beyond Sal that I moved out to Yuma, but there’s a reason I stayed – and I’m not sure what that reason is, but it’s a better reason than the one I had to move back to a place I thought was my home.

I take a shaky breath and breathe it out as frosty mist, get up from my seat, wrap up my earbuds around my SkyPod, and I shuffle back to my car. There’s snow blocking the window, but when I turn on the windshield wipers, it clears out and I can see again. The heater isn’t working, but this time I don’t really care. I’m numb anyway; I can barely feel the cold at this point.

I pull out of the bad parking job I did in the random parking lot I pulled into, and I don’t even mind that I’m lost at this point. I just go out of the city and into the suburbs. The streets become less cluttered with random stores and brick architecture, and I see lines of houses as far as the eye can see, filled with people who are probably nice and toasty in the midst of a Minnesota snowfall.

The streets ring tiny little bells in my head, and I follow the path that I remember my old high school bus taking whenever it drove me back to my old bus stop. At the stop, I turn right. Lo and behold, a mere few seconds later, I’m slowly creeping past the house I was raised in, miles from the hospital, the familiarity inching its way back into my brain.

The lawn is dead, and there are two cars in the driveway – both SUVs. Lights are shining through the windows. The mailbox is the same, the paint job the same, the roof still rickety and worn. My mom killed herself in this house. I wonder if the people who live here know that. Must be nice if they do know, being able to take a haunted memory and live with it without it interfering with their lives.

For the first time since Saturday, I have to smile to myself.

That’s it. I have all the closure I need. I can keep going.

I drive back to my hotel and watch TV until my eyelids drag me to sleep.

Tomorrow, I’m going home. I’m going back to Yuma.