six inches of bus

I have never really taken local buses before. Not out of snobbery, i just never hat to . Then I started my masters and suddenly getting anywhere meant standing at the stop, squeezing on, holding the rail while the hole thing rattled and lutched.

The first day I was genuinely nervous. Wrong stop, right stop is everyone looking at me, all the unusual stuff.

But somewhere that week something shifted. I stop reaching for my phone , ijust watched.

There was a man sitting near the front, right behind the driver seat, the bus stopped, an elderly lady got on, and without even really looking at her he just stood up and gave her his seat. No drama about it, no thank you exchange, he just sis it and sat back down somewhere else.

Nobody on that bus owened very much and nobody seemed to be holding onto what little they had either.

After that i started noticing it everywhere, A seat would empty at a stop and before ot had even really emptied someone else was already sliding into it. Two people who will never know each other, never speak , never really see one one another, sharing the exact same six inches of bus, minutes apart. Nobody made anything of it. It just happened all day like breathing.

Stranger talk on that bus, a joke, a complaint about the heat, someone’s whole day, out loud, to a person they met ninety seconds ago. Then were their stop comes and they are gone. No no. exchange, no let’s stay in touch. They were fully there for four minutes then they let it go completely, like it didn’t cost then anything to give it or to release it.

I keep thinking about how easily they let things go. A seat, a spot, a stranger’s attention, like none of it was ever really there’s to keep in tje first place. I don’t have a word for that yet. I just lnow i never used to see it, I was always somewhere else, in my phone,in my head. Now i watch

And honestly i think the people with the least are tje ones who have actually figured out how to hold things loosely.