Carrie.
Carrie.
Carrie.
Maybe I’m still at the bus stop, and Carrie has seen me. Maybe she’s come over to hug me, and tell me how much she has missed me. She’ll throw her hands around me and hug me, and kiss me, and everything will be okay again.
Because she is here.
And we’re together again.
And this time I’ll never let her go.
Not ever.
“Onwards and onwards,” he says as I put my money down.
And just like that I want to scream at him to shut up. To tell him that it’s a stupid thing to say. I think it every time he says it, every night he says it, but tonight I think I might actually say it to him. The words are lodged in my throat, and my palms are itching.
Pitter patter, pitter patter, pitter patter…
The rain is relentless, and I turn around and see the doors are still open.
“Can’t move until you sit, son,” the driver says, and I can see he’s getting irritated with me now.
“Sorry,” I reply, my voice not quite my own.
I sound drunk, my words slurred. I’m drunk on Carrie. I’m drunk on memories of the Carrie I once knew and the one I just saw. She’s both the same and not.
I take small steps toward the seats, the words I want to say to him still in my throat, on my tongue, wanting to spew from my lips. “Excuse me,” I say to an elderly man who’s resting his shopping bag on the seat I need to sit in.
The bus is full of watchful people, all wanting to get home. All tired from work. None of them alive like I am right now.
Because that’s how I feel.
Alive! I’m fucking alive for the first time in too many years.
The old guy looks at me with a frown and tuts, as if I’m the asshole blocking the only seat here. He picks up his bag and begins to move it, all the while shaking his head in irritation at me. And I want to shake my head at him. And tut at him. Maybe even ram my fist into his face and break that wrinkled old face of his.
But I’m not an asshole like him, so I don’t.
And I’m angry and frantic and excited, and fucking alive because…Carrie!
Carrie.
Carrie.
Carrie.
But I also feel like my insides might contort, pulling everything forcibly outside myself until I’m wearing my organs like a coat for all of the world to see. I’m a churning, yearning mass of self-destruction. I’m on fire with indecision.
I sit down, and he’s still tutting, and the driver has started whistling, and the rain is still coming down. And it’s too much. It’s too fucking much.
I stand back up and head to the front of the bus again, despite the fact that it’s moving now.
“Need you to sit down, please,” the driver says.
Andat least he said please,I think.
