I’m on a bus from Louisville, Kentucky, to Akron, Ohio. This is my second bus of the day; the first one I boarded at 3:30 in the morning back in Nashville, Tennessee. I’m sitting halfway down the bus, in seat 34, and I’m wearing a red dress I’ve had on since yesterday. I haven’t eaten breakfast or lunch.
It’s been raining for a while. What was a heavy storm is now a barely perceptible drizzle. The bus is quiet – hardly anyone talks – and this combination of silence and rain is blessedly comforting after my brief visit to a city that was overstimulating and noisy and far too extraverted for me.
I’m badly underequipped, in turns out, to enjoy what many people consider fun. I don’t know if this makes me an uptight bore, or just someone who likes calmer pursuits, but I’ve been noticing my pull toward a quieter and simpler life. While I was once filled with thoughts of seeing the world, these days I’m perfectly content to stay at home. A walk through the neighborhood is adventure enough. If I do travel, it seems like it’s this sort of solitary sojourning – sitting by myself on the bus, looking out the window, thinking about life – that suits me best. One day, perhaps, I’ll write an essay on the subject and call it “In Defense of Small Lives.”
I look around at my fellow passengers. They’re a diverse bunch. To my left is an Amish family: the mother in a white bonnet and a mauve dress that touches her ankles; the daughter in a black bonnet and a frock that matches her mother’s; the father, bespectacled above a long and scraggly beard; and then there’s the son, young, with soulful brown eyes, screwing the cap back on a bottle of Pepsi.
Directly in front of me, meanwhile, is a girl with neat black hair and a violin case. (It is a viola or a violin? If only I could get a better look – but I’m trying to be discreet.) She’s wearing a pink face mask – a fact which probably makes her the smartest passenger on our bus, because who knows what germs are riding with us?
(Note from Elizabeth: I will update this newsletter with the rest of this piece soon. Just wanted to put the beginnings in as a placeholder so I could publish my content – guess I’m a little impatient!)