Riding buses is really the only situation I find conducive to thinking creatively. I came to that realization this morning on the way to school. There’s something very calming about riding along with nothing but a CD player for company, watching the world fly past the window. Riding in a car with people you know calls for small talk; driving yourself means that your attention is on the road and on traffic. All of the ideas for the stories I write are born on the bus.
It’s so easy to slip into another world as you watch the landscape slip by. The sun rising over the fields and trees becomes the sun rising on some medieval kingdom. Mist creeping across the manicured lawns of a golf course lends an almost unearthly air to the whole picture; the wisps of fog could be concealing anything- an invading army, an Elven palace. The sky was particularly beautiful: smooth banks of cloud were dyed bright pink and orange by the sun, which had yet to put in an official appearance. It reminded me of something I read in a book once, about a girl holding up her hands in the sunset, struck by the way the dying light played over the skin. It was as if someone- God, maybe, or some celestial being or other, had stuck their fingers into heavenly chalks and smudged them over the firmament. There’s the setting, I thought to myself. Just before dawn, a shadowy land untouched by time. Venus dancing above the horizon, the last star to fade before the sun’s rays covered the land, banishing the mists and the shadows until the next night. I hoped that I would be able to boil down the intense imagery into words to use later, and knew that I would be, if only I didn’t get distracted by the annoying smear on the glass, left from someone resting their forehead there.
The splotch on the window reminded me that nothing I was looking at was untouched by human life. It was kind of a rude wake up call- an unspoken reminder that the golf course was just a golf course, and in a few hours I wouldn’t be musing about lost civilizations, but toiling over a math test. I could see my reflection frown in the window. People have such odd facial expressions. I wonder if my forehead always scrunches up like that when I frown. This seemed to warrant a comparison, so I attempted to study my fellow bus riders a surreptitiously as possible. In doing so, I realized that I didn’t have to leave my little story-world quite yet. The people I was on the bus with were great character studies. The girl directly in front of me was very intriguing; of all the individuals in the scope of my vision, she was the one who looked the most like she belonged in a half-there twilight world. Her amber eyes were huge; framed in a pale face by curly black hair. Okay, so maybe her duct tape purse and crayola colored Converse didn’t belong in Camelot, but that’s okay. That’s why they have poetic license. The… rather corpulent blonde woman sitting opposite her became the snooping tavern keeper, wondering what the mysteriously beautiful girl was doing traveling the land by herself. (Note to self: ditch the mullet. And the sweatpants.) It was easy to imagine them going on some accidental adventure, or the younger woman awaiting a clandestine meeting and the fat lady getting caught up in the whole thing by attempting to eavesdrop and getting found out. Maybe there would be dragons involved. Or a plot to rescue a lost princess, the [as-yet unnamed] girl being the last of a Royal Guard, all killed in a bloody war…
[05 00:01] [05 00:02] [05 00:03]
The song on the CD player has just changed. Thanks to the gods of technology and their marvelous CD burners and the ‘shuffle’ button on the CD player, the music I’ve been listening to has taken a drastic jump from the melancholy, clarinet-and-harp-heavy Star Wars Episode II love theme to Limp Bizkit’s version of the Mission Impossible song. Any thoughts of delicate fantasy fly right out of my head. In an instant the brown eyed girl becomes a vigilante mercenary, hired to dispose of the blonde woman in the corner, who, incidentally, is the maniacal overlord of a drug cartel that’s been causing more problems to the Feds than Castro and Saddam Hussein put together. It’s lucky that we’ve left the country by this point; the route past the fairgrounds goes under a whole bunch of overpasses, which create interesting shadows in the early morning light. I grin to myself, imagining the fight scenes that could take place there. Combatants leaping over drainage ditches, jumping from bridge to bridge and catapulting off graffitied, concrete walls and supports in an effort to knock each other into next Tuesday. In my mind the fight choreography plays out perfectly against the thumping beat and driving electric guitars spilling out of my earphones. I think of New York City, and how you can go from a wealthy, upscale neighborhood to the projects by crossing a street. Listening to music while driving is like that. A skip of a track is a flip of a switch; music is what really sets the mood, not the weather outside or the people squeezing into the seat because there’s no room left, just elbows and knees and sharp corners of book bags all over the place.
The bus gets progressively more and more crowded as we come closer to school. Irate passengers yell at each other to “move back, move back!” The volume of chatter has reached unbearable levels. I can only turn my CD player up so high before the sound starts to bleed, and to make matters worse the little battery sign has just blinked on. All of my pretty little daydreams are starting to fade away, lost with the rising of the sun above the buildings, running scared from the inane babble of the masses. For the millionth time in my life, I wish that I had brought along a notebook or something to record my thoughts. I should know better by now- how many stories have I lost because I didn’t write them down? Probably as many as I’ll find tomorrow, I think, as the bus screeches to a stop, throwing us all forward in our seats. I promise myself that as soon as I get off the bus I’ll sit down on the grass and write out a few notes, but as the doors swish open I remember the dreaded algebra test, and all the tales I’ve been spinning disappear as my foot hits the pavement.
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