Memories

I often find myself getting lost and found during a bus ride. Neither the length of the ride is important, nor the weather, even what kind of people are on board -- if it's crowded, empty, this does not matter. The only thing of matter is in between the leaving and the feeling of too-soon-arriving at the destination. An infinity passes in between, yet it feels as if a moment has suddenly stopped, that I am in an hourglass being spun on its side on the edge of a table, everything being surreal.
The bus is the empty spinning hourglass. It can be seen, it's able to be felt from the eyes of the passengers, from my eyes that we are all beyond serious of this time-stop. Not in a stressful way, or in a sad manner, but that this frozen moment towards our eventual departure is ours. At least mine. Seeing all that has accumulated so far, where I am now, the decisions, or better yet, the time I cannot have back -- all those carefully chosen words that I thought were so subtle, not even close -- the nothing I have done or even seen, arriving to, just before the climax of realization of some sort. And yet, the bus will stop all too soon. And, the hourglass falls and throws me back in time, and I still lose the fifteen minutes the bus took to take me here, the same place I have been for so long, nowhere. The hourglass falls from the table, shattering, spilling each invisible grain of seconds, getting back on track. Back to where I am, to where I have been.

I have been alone for some time now. Looking back at the recent memories, they are of me sitting absolutely alone, in the car or at work, or at home. Absolutely alone. I remember one night, the night of my 21st birthday. I had no one to be with, so I sat there in the car, looking through old pictures of me. Alone me, alone on the beach, by myself on the road, just me. I did not want to get out of the car albeit it was a frozen winter. No one to talk to or send even a message. Dealing with everything on my own, it was and still is tough to do.
I remember the month having to go through what my mom was going through for some time, that subconsciously chose to ignore. Sleeping in that small, tiny room in the back of a store. It was a women's hair and accessories store. We had one furniture, which my mom used to sleep, the recliner. We had a dorm sized refrigerator, my mom would buy me chocolate milk because she knew I loved it. We had a one-top propane-fueled stove to cook with. She would still try and cook me my favorite meals with the limited things she had.
And, a bathroom, no bath. To shower, we would sit in a big blue plastic tub and use the water from the sink. If you use the hot water too long, which wasn't long enough, the water would turn rusty brown. I don't think the water heater has been looked at for some time. Yeah, that was it. The water heater haven't been looked at for a while.
When we closed the store, around 9pm, my mom would take the car out from the storefront and drive around for a little while and come back, to park it in the back as to be seen as if she had left to go to her real home. And, maybe she did.
I would bring out a set of blankets to sleep on the back corner of the front, where all the merchandise was. My mom, with her heated blankets, always fell fast asleep, her snoring being able to be heard through the paper thin walls. I stayed awake for some time. I subscribed to a one-month free Netflix trial. I usually watched things with some type of subtle romance and a touch of comedy. The type I never found yet constantly searched for.
When I would wake, around 6am, I always needed to be silent. There was a private drug company next door, and someone was always there early, right before dawn. Like acquiescence in a mixture of juxtaposition, whatever metaphor one needs to see to understand it, I quietly went towards the back room, carrying my array of blankets with the first rays of sunlight at my heels, sat on the recliner, and with headphones on, watched more Netflix. I wanted, for at least an hour longer, to not be where I was, to be somewhere that felt more like home.
My mom would have already been gone in the early stages of morning before anyone was even thinking about what to eat for breakfast. I never really asked where she'd been because I already know what she would say: to church.
She would bring my morning favorite: chicken salad and a bottle of chocolate milk from the corner gas station and just like that, morning began.