Kaleidoscope

three

"The soul should always stand ajar."  - Emily Dickinson

His role, apparently, was being lost.

Not just sort of lost, either. Truly lost. Jesse stopped walking and ran a hand through his hair. In front of him was a post office, but it didn’t look like the same one he’d passed ten minutes ago. And he was sure he’d never seen that row of birch trees ahead of him before.

“Damn it,” he muttered. He hadn’t recognized any of the buildings since he’d run into the girl with the flowers, but he’d thought he could somehow trace his steps back to the river and from there to his motel.

But he couldn’t. He should have known that. This wasn’t Jacksonville, Florida. It wasn’t home. That was the whole point of moving here in the first place. There was no retracing. Only figuring out what came next.

Jesse exhaled slowly. No reason to get bitter. At least, no reason to get even more bitter than he already was. He could look for a bus stop and work from there. There had to be a bus stop in the area. Lowell might be pathetic, but it had public transport.

He started walking again, kicking at the damp flyers scattered across the sidewalk in front of the post office. Somebody must have dropped them and not had any time to pick them up. The ink on the paper was already fading, the colors dissolving into the asphalt.

The girl’s flowers had been so much brighter. Of course, they hadn’t been floored for long. Definitely not as long as the flyers. She had gathered them up quickly, tucking them back into her hands while Jesse stood over her and apologized. He should have offered to help her. He should have been a little bit less abrupt when he walked away. But he hadn’t been.

Maybe “bitter” wasn’t the right word for him. Maybe “asshole” was more appropriate.

Jesse rounded a corner and upped his pace. A short way ahead, a signpost and a blue bench marked the location of a bus stop. A map was attached to the post, the bus routes traced and numbered and color-coded. Jesse studied it carefully. Bus five. That was the one he needed to wait for. It would take him back to his motel. Back to the white walls and hard mattress that were so unlike the freedom he’d been seeking when he arrived in Lowell. More like a hospital without the bustle. The exact thing he’d wanted to get away from. It would have been ironic, if it hadn’t been so downright shitty.

Two buses drove by the signpost in the next fifteen minutes. They appeared at the end of the road with a low rumble and a whoosh of air like a groan, then crawled past Jesse and vanished around the corner. Jesse lit a cigarette and brought it to his lips. The smoke, at least, tasted familiar. They didn’t let you smoke in hospitals.

He had just dropped the cigarette and ground it into the sidewalk with his shoe when bus number five came. Jesse stepped forwards and watched the vehicle slow gradually to a halt, the doors swishing open with a sigh. He climbed in.

The bus was almost empty. Jesse, glancing around, saw a child with his mother, a man reading a newspaper, and a young woman with caramel-colored hair.

A young woman holding a bunch of flowers.

The bus started moving. Jesse stumbled at the sudden jolt and grasped at the back of a seat to keep from falling. When he looked up again, she was still there. She had her feet up on the bench, the flowers arranged in the crook of her arm. Her hair was swept to one side, over her shoulder. Jesse could see the dark comma shape of headphones in her left ear. She was listening to music. She hadn’t heard him come in.

Jesse caught himself wondering if it was too late to jump out of the bus.

As if she’d heard him think, the girl raised her head. She smiled.