greyhounds

This is all I have so far in looking toward my trial start, and I can't figure out where to go. I see myself, the narrator, sitting on the bus contemplating the dullness many passengers seem to feel, the subdued living of the poor, deadened curiosities, the moment of travel and leaving one place for another, home, the present, looking out windows, the community of a bus, the nature of community as something you don't get to choose, being surprised by people once you're trapped on a bus with them for hours, letting yourself be open to learning about other people's hearts. And I have no idea which way I'm going to go, which avenue is calling my name loudest. I think I just need to sit in it, stew in it, and let things soak until I see a pattern appear. Some sort of arc. This is it so far:

A tattered red carpet, stained and fading to brown, splits Louisville’s Greyhound station down the center. It’s like Red Sea’s parting, except that the hordes of voyaging people stand to either side on the orange-flecked linoleum instead of walking down the middle. No one who rides the Greyhound is lavish enough to pay ten extra dollars for a red-carpet entrance and a few minutes’ head start onto the bus. The seats are all the same—worn, cramped, oily, the armrests crusted with chewing gum.

             The Greyhound route is the pilgrimage of the poor, a web of highways stretched thin between grey cities. Many passengers approach the Greyhound almost as if it were an underground tunnel, passing blindly through the darkness of sleep, night, and oblivion between stops. A handful of us—tattooed and pierced single moms jiggling their babies into a stupor, up and down, up and down, old men with bad backs and worn baseball caps, and college students like myself—keep our eyes open during the trip, watching for that moment when Tennessee becomes Kentucky and Kentucky rolls into Indiana. If you blink even for a moment and pass the welcome sign, it’ll slip by unseen; the change is subtle, miles of mountains becoming miles of hills and then fading away into the flat of the prairies. My dad used to say you could stand on a tin can and see all the way to Iowa on a clear day.

            Most passengers don’t look all the way out to Iowa’s horizon. Most don’t look out the windows at all. Maybe they’re burdened by the weight of things and grasp at sleep whenever they can, as life pauses in the hush of the bus. Some seem numbed by years of lackluster living, carrying dullness with them like their suitcases, heavy and drab.