On Love, In Transit

J. Dana Stuster

I think you want this, too. This closeness. You want this; we all do. If you could have nothing or this, you would take this, too. Yeah, you want this. You want to stand where I’m standing, bunched like discarded towels, disordered like marbles in a jar, all of us on this bus packed too tight for any of us to move.
It’s eight forty-two on a Friday morning, each of us going to a class we wish we weren’t. Each of us stands silently, some of us with music in our ears, others in our minds, others just the persistent grumbling of the engine. If we spoke, we’d all say none of us wants to be here, but part of us does. But we don’t speak on the bus, so we never get the opportunity to lie.
You want to stand here, with your feet where mine are, the toe of your right shoe edged presumptuously between her heels, but she doesn’t notice that, does she? How can she? With someone’s backpack in her face, she can’t see the floor, her feet. You want to reach your arm over her shoulder and hold the pole just above her hand so you can feel her thumb graze the edge of your palm. You want to feel that touch, that touch like an unsaid suggestion; you want to feel what that is like on the side of your palm. You want to feel her shoulder edge into your chest as she sways into you with the acceleration of the bus. You want to breathe deep the smell of her hair as it tickles your nostrils. You want to suppress the self-destructive desire that she’ll turn her head too quickly, her cheek into your surprised lips.
“Oh, sorry,” you’d murmur, and that would be the end of it.
In this moment, this is the only place I want to be.
She’s beautiful. Her lilting stance, the way her peacoat tailors to the sway of her figure, the way her fingers, delicate, nimble, curl lightly, like paper in a flame, around the cold metal pole. Yes, she’s beautiful, but it’s her face. The dollop of her chin, the arcing rises of her cheeks ripened by the chill, and eyes mellow and brown like honey. It makes her frown, that tragic frown, look so wrong.
Everyone on the bus frowns, as if to assert the unspoken lie that we all wish we were somewhere else. This is different, though. She frowns as if she’ll never smile again. This is the only way I’ve ever seen her.
I want to make her smile, if only to see what it would look like. If you could stand where I do, you’d want to know what her smile would be like too. I imagine it would be humble, with her lips drawn up slight and fast, like a flinch almost, and never breaking to reveal her teeth. But to even try means to transgress these bounds, the setting of my feet and my arm locked and holding the pole. It would be beyond my place to try to see that smile.
The bus pulls away from a stop and I grip more tightly, brace myself more forcefully, to feel her shoulders press into me. I imagine ghosts of my arms around her waist, the phantom of her head against my cheek, her breath and lips curling like a cat around my neck. The trap door beneath my heart is wide. There’s no blood left in my veins; I feel the serotonin and dopamine and hormones pulsing through me in its stead. In the quieter recesses of the night, I’ll remember what this felt like.
She’s painted her fingernails crimson. I want to feel them on my skin, feel the smoothness of the lacquer, and could they bite and tear? I want them to leave a mark, to leave some of their red on me; I want to take a part of her with me.
I dream of car crashes and explosions, of her and me. Anything that could slow this moment. But on a bus, cars seem insignificant. Nothing can stop this motion to an end and her walking away. Nothing that I could ever do.

“Why is it that I never see you smile?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I just think it’s such a shame, you know?”
“Why?”
“Because you’re beautiful.”
It’s like catching a spark. Even if I can find it in the air, by the time I open my hands it has faded from fire to charcoal. It’s like that. It flickers fast enough to miss, but it was there. Something tangible, that I could feel like where an ember might have pinched my palm. She flinches, and it’s more than just apologetic the way her melancholic lips tense for an instant, and then release.
The bus is slowing, is stopping, and she brushes close as she steps past. She must know what she’s doing; it’s in the pressure as she leans through me, the way she steadies herself on my shoulder. I breathe her deep as she goes, and I smile at her. Maybe she smiles again, but even in this, even in my best daydreams, when I have the right words and the right timing, she always walks away. She always will. But even so, in this moment you want to be me, to stand where I’m standing and know this, know this closeness. Yeah, you want this as much as me. So I’ll be happy just to stand here and let this be all I want.