Looking up from my seat after a slight jolt of the bus, I immediately notice the girl sitting in the seat across from me, her body sprawled out between the two oddly colored cushions. A longing for something that she doesn’t even know plagues her bright blue eyes. She looks young, maybe eighteen or so, but I can tell she’s been through a fire that’s never quite been extinguished. She gazes outside the window and out onto the rainy outdoors, where it is coming down so hard you can hardly see anything but raindrops. She slowly opens her small, tattered bag and pulls out a tube of lip balm. This is the third time in the short ten-minute ride that she has slowly but intently rubbed the balm across her full, pink lips, making sure to not miss a single spot. She carries with her a cellphone that constantly beeps in her bag. She blankly stares down at the messages piling up, believing that they are as meaningless as empty promises. She plans on getting off at Orson Street, the street where her parents live, even though she hasn’t seen them in ages and isn’t even sure they will remember her face when she surprises them at their door. I can’t help but wonder if her name is Lucy, or Scarlett, or Rose, or anything at all. Whatever it is, those syllables would never be enough.
    She slowly smiles at the man sitting in the cramped seat next to me. He has long, auburn hair that is greasily tousled at the front, looking like he hasn’t showered in ages. He wears thick, brown glasses that he must have found in an old antique store. His coat has rips at the elbows and a coffee stain on the right breast. He had become fond of coffee when too many late nights of thinking led caffeine to being the only thing giving him a lifeline. He must’ve come from another world, or at least he hoped he did. He plans on getting off at Willow Avenue, where he will go to the library to check out a book of poetry that he will never quite get around to returning, but instead absorbing the words and trying to become a part of them. He has taken the bus every day for the last three years. Ever since he dropped out of college because of too many expectations and too much studying girls’ blue eyes instead of sociology.
    Across from them is an old man, probably in his seventies, but with eyes that look young. His deep wrinkles look like only an accessory. He is full of stories that have never been told — like the time he fell off the swings at his grandmother’s farmhouse and broke his arm, and the time he fell in love with a girl with hazel eyes and broke his heart because he couldn’t be with her and couldn’t be with himself. His young eyes grow older with every sip of liquor he takes and every bus ride he forces himself to sit through to get to Cedar Street, with the house of his daughter who despises his weekly visits but wills herself to get through them for the sake of family.
    He quickly glances over at the middle-aged man standing with a briefcase by the doors, who looks like he hasn’t slept in weeks. He looks determined, like the stress and the tired eyes are what he was made for. His pants are slightly too short, his shoes slightly too big, and his aspirations slightly too small. He scratches his slightly balding, grey hair and sighs at the monotonous day he is bound to have today. He will get off at Landon Way, the same stop he got off at yesterday, the day before that, and for as long as he could remember. As he looks out the grey metal windows where the rain is beginning to dissipate he considers getting off at Elm Road and going to the park where he first tasted strawberry ice cream. He never liked the taste of it, or the chunky texture, but maybe he would get it again today. Maybe years later, his tastes would have changed, he would have changed.
    The bus driver sighs from the front of the bus. She’d seen as many different faces enter the vehicle in the course of her 12 years as stars in the night sky. Her callused hands hold the wheel that she holds on to as tight as her past. She got the job in an attempt to be constantly on the move and never have to sit and remember the day her father’s voice grew a little too loud and her mother’s much too quiet. Throwing her hair up into a tight bun sitting on the top of her head, she feels in control. Simply a box of store bought dye would fix her greying hair, but she has no desire to grow younger. She has no desire to do anything except get to the next stop. She convinces herself she is happy — so much so that she is.
    Entering the bus is a young couple, in their twenties most likely. As they walk by towards the back of the bus, the man looks in her eyes like she is his umbrella and she looks at him like he is her storm. She giggles as he whispers something in her ear. I wonder if he is telling her that he loves her, that she is beautiful, that she makes him feel seasick, but that he’s begun to like the feeling of knowing he will not drown. I wonder if that will be enough. I desperately want to get to know them, for them to get to know me.               Instead, I make my last stop at Magnolia Road, where I’ll go to the high platform of the bridge with the freezing water that I’ve thought about stopping at a thousand times. Walking off of the bus, I let them go. I let all the memories, the blue-eyed girls, and the strawberry ice cream go, but even knowing it is the end, I am grateful.