The Bus That *almost* Got Away

One night, I sat quietly on a nearly empty bus, in the dark, waiting to head to the parking lot where my car was waiting for me. I sat about three rows back, just a bit behind the vertical handicapped-accessible seats where they start laying horizontal, like rows of oreo cookies. I leaned against the cold window quietly, bold yellow light streaming down from scattered lamp posts, illuminating sections of floor and casting everything else in shadow. One man near my age sat on the window side parallel to me, farther back in the bus, the muffled buzz of his headphones humming lightly.

As I sat in my seat I felt magnetically bound to the floor, shaking and vibrating gently. It growled quietly beneath my feet with the rolling growl of the running engine. The atmosphere was different from outside, the kind of air you only feel when it's brought from outside, restless, listless, coming and going like it was a passenger in itself. We only had to sit for about 10 minutes, just long enough to be on schedule and stretch out the allotted time frame expected between stops. Not many buses run after about five. Nearing 8 o'clock the few night school students would surely be anxious to make their way to their vehicles. It was important to stay on time.

I looked to the empty and felt lined seats in front of me, then to the plastic wall that reached floor to ceiling behind the drivers seat. Had she gone to the bathroom? The front end of the vehicle was so still and quiet, it had felt undisturbed for a while. It wasn't unusual for the drivers to leave the bus running while they ran to the bathroom for a quick break. When had she left? I didn't remember even watching her leave. In the dark stillness I would have surely heard her footsteps, or the hydraulic crank of the door.

I continued to think, Think about the running bus. About the quiet. The still. It was just us. It was dark outside, late. The school was asleep and so was the lot around us. No one to witness our waiting but the hundreds of yellow and white lines spray painted against the dark asphalt.

What if the bus just....Left?

I looked back to the plastic wall. There was no one there, surely. I had missed her leaving. What if the bus just began to roll away? It would surely pick up speed, in an empty lot there was nothing to stop us beyond the road that lie ahead. The humming beneath my feet began to feel more dire. I had never driven a bus before... If it began to roll away on it's own could I manage in time to stop it? The weight of my backpack gripped at my tired shoulders, even sitting and at rest. Would I be able to shoulder it off in time to get to the drivers seat and hit the brake?

My heart began to pound as I looked around frantically. The other guy didn't seem concerned. He stared blankly at his phone, probably thumbing through click bate and stacks of adds behind the tiny glowing screen. How was he not concerned? We were sitting on a running bus, alone. A bus which could, at any moment, malfunction and leave without us having the slightest bit of preparedness.

I heard the familiar sharpness of the exhaust, the change in the rumbling as the bus began to move. Surely this wasn't happening. I jumped fully upright in my seat, the breath catching so hard in my chest as I clamored to pull myself upright. I had to get to the front, I was the closest. I jumped forward in a shaken frenzy and made it to the edge of the seat. As I grabbed the plastic backing of the row in front of me to haul myself upward I saw the driver. She was casually pulling away from the stop, taking us on to the next parking lot. I looked back to the other student, he hadn't noticed my hurry.

It took more than a year after thinking the bus was going to leave on its own for me to finally go to a doctor to start medication for anxiety. In school it wasn't noticeable to me. School is stressful, work is stressful, and stress was nothing particularly new. I remembered telling my mom about the incident and she suggested I visit my doctor.

"I really thought the bus was out of control. I really thought it was moving on its own."

Nearly a year later, some time away from school and a low dose of medication it's a memory I haven't actually visited in quite a while. At the time, whether I realized it or not, my life was steadily becoming that fictitious, self-actualizing bus. It felt out of control, and only was so by a figment of my imagination. Where was I going? How was I getting there? When did I lose sight of the driver and how do I make this momentum into the unknown stop? I had become a master of my own torture, I could gaslight myself into believing any number of unimaginable things were the truth.

Taking time from school to work helped. While my hiatus has been a result of several factors, timing, money, health issues of family and bureaucratic fuck ups on the part of the university, I have come to love and admire its kinship. There are things I love about school, and there are things I hate. I love to learn and be with my friends and peers, I loved my team and my classmates and many of my teachers. Sometimes I even loved my classes. But it was not all without a certain level of self-loathing. I hate deadlines. I hate the leering eye of expectation and the presumption of acquired success in life that seems ever more dependent on obtaining a degree these days. I hate that it was my identity. That people seemed to have little concern as to the things I did and loved in my life and more with why I was still in school and still didn't have a B.A. and still hadn't settled on a particular major.

Biology was a weed-out program for med students. I had neither the interest, the discipline, nor the fortitude to continue it. Not to mention chemistry can bite it for all I care.

Equine Business was my love, but that required math, and  copious amounts of hours which (I'm not sure you are aware) constitute time, which in the ends requires money, neither of which I had a lot of. So after four years that left me with Communications. Granted, the major has been more of a challenge than I had anticipated, and I do love talking, but when you tell people you're aCOM major there's that distinctive look they give you. You know the one.

"Oh! Okay I see, well that's...good."

It's that phrase people like to throw at you to try and deter from what they are really thinking, which is that you must not be very smart or very good at school if the best you can manage is a degree in talking. This isn't based in any kind of truth, but that in the end is the assumption people tend to make, and for some reason, even more so, tend to assume I can't tell they are thinking. Of course I can tell, I'm a communication major.

School apparently is the all ending identity for those of us in our twenties. People always want to know where I am in school. Am I done yet? What's my major? When am I graduating? Am I in school now? You already finished right?

The truth is I became the most intelligent I've ever been when I stepped away from the University. I studied more, read (and even finished) books, bought my own study materials, and devoted nearly every bit of my time that wasn't spent working or sleeping sitting in some coffee shop or wifi accessible restaurant just absorbing all the knowledge I could about animal medicine or farm business models, or even just goats in general. I'm not encouraging people to leave school, but I am encouraging people to abandon its stigma.

Some of the most idiotic people I've met in my life have wall tapestries painted with diplomas. They don't have the sense God gave a rubber duck, but damn can they regurgitate obscure facts and antiquated references. Meanwhile, a construction worker with a High School diploma and a photographic memory for blueprints and three dimensional design is considered to be at the bottom wrung of the culturally appreciated latter. A farmer who can manage and feed a thousand cattle, keep them alive all year (and their hay too) get them butchered and put on your dinner table every single year hardly gets a second glance. There's so much busy in the world and expectation of delineated success that it seems like a lot of people have forgotten what success is.

And while others of my age might have been doing homework, submitting online tests, or studying for finals I sat on a shuttle contemplating an elaborate plan to bring it to a stop once it undoubtedly made its un-piloted exit.

I have a lot of respect for the people who become classically successful, because it isn't easy. But I have to question why many do it, and how many sacrifice their health and well-being on the way? How many do it truly because they thirst for knowledge and brim with passion versus those who become successful out of simply spite, or because it was told to them. How did some passions become more valued than others? Every second we tick away, another minute is gone in a life with an uncertain final chapter. And so much space becomes wasted trying to live up to others expectation .

In writing this blog, I'm hoping to replace the expectation some feel. I'm hoping to maybe reach out to the not-so-normal people who seem to wander and go with the obscure and brush covered paths laid out before them. This blog is about a lot of things. My anxiety, and the path of healthier living, the horses and goats and all the other curious creatures I spend my life obsessed with, and the general maintenance of an obscure and less than normal mind. I hope, that with this blog, I can find a cathartic release to the various thoughts and monologues I'm left reeling with at the end of many days, and that I can maybe help some find the obscure beauty in the world.

I hope that with this blog you will accept my challenge to dare you to be different, and maybe even, soul-satisfyingly happy.