There’s always another bus. Buses: often how I know I live in a city. The suburbs have buses too, of course, although they come less often and travel farther. Many times there has not been a bus when I want one or when one is supposed to be there. Are there cities without buses?
Today I’m not waiting for a bus. I waited for them, many times, for years, but now I rarely wait for buses anymore. I walk or drive a car. When I’m in my car, I’m aware that my car, driving on a road among other cars, is destroying the planet.
I’m interested in what happens as I drive along in my car, not on the bus anymore, destroying the planet. Does it make me unimportant, one more person nobody knows driving along in a car much like all the others? Or important, because all of us in our cars, driving along, alone or not, are destroying the planet?
It’s strange to think these things while not riding in a bus or a car, while not going anywhere actually, sitting in a coffee shop drinking a can of sparkling water, knowing that some time soon I will be driving and again destroying the planet. I look up and I don’t see a bus and I wonder if that means that I don’t know, really, where I am. Most of the time, though a million people live here, it doesn’t seem like a city at all.
Oh bus, there you are, going somewhere without me.