How easy if love were like a bus route, when in early morning, seconds too late, as tail lights shrink and hulking metal huffs away, breaking your adolescent heart, when older riders assure you, uselessly, of others arriving sooner than you think...well, then in those moments you could turn to a timetable and see that they're right, that the next will be just as good, and perhaps it is, that more will come with increasing frequency, and likely they do, and soon you're nearing the city and cannot travel a block without hitting a stop and falling in love.
You're young and your heart is a fare-free zone, standing on corners where many routes converge. You transfer from Wonderful to Unknown simply because you can. The longest you need wait is eight minutes, and often that feels too long; yes, you're weightless: several buses kneeling at your curb, doors open, and all you must do is choose one, and that feels like too much––like agony, in fact––making you long for places only express routes can take you.
Stops spaced like mile markers––less whiplash, you tell friends at work, fewer skyscrapers too, the tall apartment buildings replaced by condos and suburban homes. This slowing is something you do and do not want any different. These riders: professionals and homemakers, their babies or briefcases beside them, some graying, some looking quizzically out windows, familiar streets foreign in afternoon light. Many leap at longed-for exits not so much for their rightness as much as their rarity, while you ride on.
In quiet moments you retire to a back-row seat, wrestle out wadded transfers and study their color, their numbers, now faded as old valentines and long expired. Hopefully these slips no longer break your heart, oh why would they? Few stops remain, the unceasing pace now a comfort. Your fellow riders are gone, all but that one across the aisle who you at first watched so intently and greeted so warmly––Where are you going? Where are you from?––who you then somehow forgot but also remembered, often at the right times, who now stands and extends a hand much like your own; you need not take it but do––common routes alone convey love––so that when your street nears beyond the glass, when the bus brakes gasp and the ever-abiding driver yanks open the door one last time calling end of the line, together you leave, intent for home.
