07: the bus stop

Day seven and it's the one where I'm not scared, which I think is the worst part.

I want to get this out while it's still burning in my mind because I know what the shape of tomorrow looks like. Kate texted me at 4:12 pm, a picture of the clean white bag with my name on it and a thumbs up. She got it. It's on the counter, I can see it from here. I haven't opened the bag. I AM going to, I'm going to take it at 6:50 am like a normal person and go to work and be small, but I wanted to write this down first, from this side of existence, before the door closes. Because I am positive somebody saw me today in a way I can’t describe.

I take the 14 home. I've taken the 14 home for three years, the same stop, bench, the bus shelter with the one cracked panel, you know the kind. There's usually four or five of us at 5:15 and we've never spoken, that's the deal, that's the whole social contract of the bus stop. Today I'm standing at the curb because I couldn't sit down, I haven't been able to sit still since Monday, and I'm watching the traffic light across the intersection because... okay because the walk signal was counting down and the numbers that came up were out of order. 12, 11, 9, 10, 8. I watched it do a full cycle like that. Nobody else at the stop was looking at it. Why would they? And then I did the thing, I looked away and looked back, and it was fine, 7, 6, 5, and the correction took, I don't know, I didn't count that one. I was too tired to count. And when I looked away from the signal there was a person looking at me.

Not just at me. At the signal, and then at me, and then at the signal. Back and forth. Quick. Like ping pong, signal, me, signal, me, and every time it came back to me it had a question in it. I'm bad at faces. I've always been bad at faces, I've been told my whole life I don't look at people enough, and I'm telling you I know exactly what that face was doing because it was doing what mine does. It was checking, asking. It was saying “Did you see that? Did you see that? Tell me you saw that.”

He was older than me. His coat too heavy for the weather. Holding a bag from the pharmacy, actually, the same white bag, I know I noticed that but I'm not going to make it mean anything. I don't know his name. I didn't ask. I know this is the kind of story where you'd want me to have asked and I didn't, because the bus was coming, the 14 was two blocks down, and I had maybe a minute, and what I did with the minute was I looked back at him and I nodded. Once. And they nodded. And he said, quiet, just to me, not moving their mouth much:

"You saw it too."

It was not a question. That's the thing. You saw it too. Like they'd been waiting a long time to say it to somebody and had it ready.

And I said "the signal," and he said "the signal, the sign on the bank, the bench," and they tipped their head at the bench in the shelter, the one I hadn't sat on, and I looked at the bench and I'm not going to tell you what was wrong with the bench because I don't want you to go look at yours, I want you to just believe me that when I looked, they were right, it was wrong, and when I looked back it was once again just a bench.

And then the bus was there. The doors opened and everybody got on and he didn't. He stayed there on the curb. I got on, because that's what I do at 5:15, I get on the 14, and I went to the back and looked out the window and they were still standing there, holding the pharmacy bag, and they did the ping pong one more time. The bus, me, the bus. And then the bus pulled out and I couldn't see him any longer.

I've been trying to suss out what I feel and the honest answer is I feel like I did when I was a kid and another kid finally said out loud that the thing everybody was pretending about was fake. Vindication. Somebody else was in the room. Somebody else saw it. For a week I've been the only one who doesn't slide and that's an extremely specific kind of lonely, it's a lonely with teeth, and for one minute at a bus stop it had somebody else in its mouth.

And under the rush, this. If there's one, there's more. If people are out here seeing the countdown go 9, 10, 8 and not saying anything, then the not-saying is the thing. The not-saying is how it works. Everybody who sees it does what I did for a week and what they did for I don't know how long, they keep it in a notebook or they don't keep it at all, and they nod at strangers at bus stops and get on the bus.

I nodded and got on the bus.

The bag's on the counter. Kate said "big day tomorrow!" when I came in, in the sing-song, and I said yeah, and she asked if I wanted her to set an alarm for me and I said I have an alarm, and she said "I know, just in case," and I let her.

Tomorrow I take the pill and I'm small again. I know what happens to this entry when I'm small. I've read entry 05 twice tonight and it already sounds like somebody else, somebody a little embarrassing, somebody who says cosmos. Fine. Let them be embarrassing. They saw the hall.

Same stop. Same time. 5:15, the 14. If you saw it too, I'm the one at the curb.