A sobering beginning and end to each day.

I have come to refer to my closest friend (we spend two hours together each day), the city bus, as the Great Equalizer. Side by side sit well-dressed businessmen, students, homeless folk, and addicts of all kinds. Vastly different yet all dependent on this box-shaped vessel to transport them to their destination. As a rule, people on public transit mind their own business. I was hoping the bus could provide me with a platform for that much lacking human connection in my life, but if you look at someone too long or attempt to hold a conversation, the response you get is generally the rabbit-like fear of frozen expression and averted eyes, making it clear that you are scaring them; only crazies try to talk on the bus. So people are generally quiet, but when you get a "raver", as I've begun to call them, the bus develops an erie ultra-silence, as people try too hard to disappear into themselves so as not to become a target for the presiding "lunatic". The bus is a world of its own: all these people thrown together and unable to escape until the bus-world collides with their respective portals to the outside world -- which seems safer and more sane only because all the "crazy" (or, more often, just different) people are farther spread apart. It's easier to ignore the things you don't want to see when they're not sitting next to you; when people's chaotic or broken lives can be kept on the other side of the sidewalk or the other side of the city instead of jammed into the neighboring seat. Things are always clearer closer up, and this miniature world inevitably becomes a magnifying glass into the human existence. Perhaps I should instead call my friend the Great Microscope.

It is no wonder that the bus often leaves me feeling melancholy and slightly disoriented. I have not yet decided the best practice for surviving this situation. Shall I continue to ride, observe, and be melancholy? Retreat into my book or my own little world, and numb myself to the experience? Avoid the bus altogether? That would be quite the walk.