XXXIX

N

ausea, nor rot nor sin, shall not install a field of ice to imprison me. The horizons might be still on every side and no life break the plane of sky, but I will not yet be entombed. Celestial brilliance might reflect golden upon a surrounding sea of stillness but its faint warmth is not needed for melting what prison I might defy. Massed choirs sing commandments, passkeys, and pleas to me but they are a cacophony of opportunities that I cannot heed. Not silenced, these are instead melted into the background murmurs of the other passengers. Every muted conversation heard was a hearkening to another manner of living. Their hopeful drone was lost though in the relentless driving tone of the tires that propelled the bus south upon its course.

My only travel bag took up the seat beside me. Some sort of logo adorned it, but I know not which. My load was lighter this time.

The idle mind drifted amid the Greyhound to listen in on assorted lazy conversations. They spoke, at most, to distract themselves from boredom or from obligation. There was no energy. No exit. Acceptance. The sentences are short.

Travellers, each within arm's reach, make no connections. We were without rhythm or harmony, as notes scattered randomly upon a page - unplayable. Without crescendo, a freight truck passing solo, burst rushing upon my window. For that time, the proximity and volume of that block dominates my thoughts. There is a denouement though. I watched it drive away, growing less large and less loud and less a part of my life. And once more we shared the solitude of our common cell.

I could, I knew, turn to any one among the other dozens to grasp them by the metaphorical lapels and engage them. I could force some kind of connection, some unity of souls. Such connections already existed. We would, in every case, have some common cause, some unifying secret shared. Everyone here could be liked or loved, by me, if I but gave them a chance - if I but gave myself the chance. Every listless inmate had, within them, the electric spark that could excite my atoms. It might be the wasted teens or the heaviest of housewives onboard to visit her distant sister. It could be the mother and child, or the wastrel in the worn to faded leather jacket. Every heart beat with precious and unique life. Within whatever span of days each had laid before them yet, was the potential for a thousand perfect moments.

I could not cause myself to care. Instead, slumped low in the chair with knees braced on the one before, I was content to remain the voyeur. I separated myself spiritually and made myself smaller physically. Likely, any such choice was beyond me. It was not in my nature to care. It was not my habit. One cannot will their heart to care. It must, through loneliness or empathy, be thrust upon them. Loneliness had not brought me to this place or the one just passed. My solitude was not constructed by building blocks of despair and loneliness.

And then from just behind my shoulders, a child complained to his exhausted mother about some misplaced misfortune. The universe, and in particular the matron, had denied this five-year old some certain justice. His arguments were as weak as they were uninformed so he indulged in escalations of volume and repetition. The subject is stretched so that the sentence is lengthened.

Briefly, I entertained the notion of inserting myself into that scene as the boy's advocate. I could show him how it ought be done. For all future attempts to persuade adults, he could use force of logic and reason. Never again would whining be his only recourse. Rhetoric might be disbarred and appeals could be made to empathy.

Because those of us with the capacity to reason never whine nor moan.

Grow up.

We think everything thought, in all permutations, clearly and completely, and we come to conclusions with decisiveness.

Put away childish things.

I was reeling in the loose silver thread that led to Anne. It was in my youth that I had fastened myself to her. I had outgrown many such threads, to classmates and bullies, cousins and neighbours, but this one seemed strong as spider silk. It was less a bond of friendship than an anchor chain forged by sentimentality. By following this course, I was pulling myself back through time to a whence that is fondly remembered. It was a time when I was happy. It was not a happy time though. Surely, by common standards, I was hungry, insecure, lonely, and disconnected when I was in Florence. My simple recent still life might have been better than anything that was ever painted in Florence … by me.

No wending line connects my soul to any part of my life when I had, with my pallet-knife, made mud cakes. I might have been happy then.

The bus was an arrow, speeding true to Anne because that slight girl was my direct connection to my ideal self. It is a self that never was and she in no ways represents a path to that imagined being. This Virgil can only guide me through the Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory that she knows. It would have naught to do with my own journey.

Once, it might have.

Once, we might have undertaken to share our courses.

That kid just wouldn't stop whining. His voice broke through the burble of passengers to enforce clarity and attention. The brat was entirely selfish.

I sought to distract myself by focussing on the landscape. We flew by it all so quickly, of course. When a car, low, moved parallel to our path, I fixed my gaze upon the details of the interior. I could see the drinking cups in the tray between driver and passenger, Timmy's, and puzzled to find some import in that. Now - Then, inside that foreign automobile that hurtled at speed down the same highway, I could hypothesize some intimate appreciation but it sped off and left me to imagine the wife, the partner, the sister, scolding the driver as she hovered her overcautious hand over the dashboard as though to save her self from impact.

And then again the windowscape was all a disconnected blur until I stretched my focus further on, away from the silver-grey highway. Distant objects seemed still. No, they slowly turned for me but I was obliged to only imagine the dark side for they offered only a fixed face and that was far away and that soon enough too fled into my past. Artifice allowed me to imagine the details of those distant things. I constructed what I could not see with what I wished were there. As mountains reflected in my glazed eyes, I paid little mind to what transports made their way beneath my window and I paid little heed to the noisesome child that drummed his feet upon the spine of my seat.

I retreated further to the solitude and let my lids be lowered, then I could dream her far away and fix-ed face.

XL