THE VISION IS A PLACE | ✓ {complete}

Chapter 13 - white tiles and florescent lights

The floor was dirty, covered in sand and salt from the roads, trailed in on peoples shoes from the months of snow before. It was March now, and Spring equinox was just a few days away. The air was warm enough to get by without a jacket, when just five days ago it was snowing where I was in the desert. Seasons didn't feel so concrete anymore.

White tiles bordered the lower half of the walls. The room felt so much bigger from down there. I noticed a spider's web under the sink between the rusty, dust covered pipes. There's something hopeful about seeing a piece of nature survive where you wouldn't expect it. I stretched towards it to get a better look. Perfection like that would only last a short while in nature before the wind, or the rain, or some animal would break it apart. In there it was safe, but pointless. The web would stay untouched, and look perfect, but no insects would ever find it. I wondered if the spider knew that. Maybe it made the web for a different reason. Maybe it made it to have something to show for its brief life; to give it meaning to it beyond the one it was assigned. On the most basic level, the purpose of life is to perpetuate more life, right? By doing art, maybe we defy that. Perhaps art is a way of surviving certain truths. Maybe the spider and I aren't all that different; it makes webs that will never be found and I write music that will never be heard.

Little black legs started to curl around to the front of the pipes, feeling around for something to hold onto. I was paying so much attention to the spider that the heavy knocks on the door made me jump. Someone was pounding on it with there fist and a baby was crying on the other side.

"Hurry up! This is a family washroom!" yelled an angry female voice.

I lifted my bag onto my back and helped the little spider from the pipes, into my palm. With my guitar in my other hand, I took one last look in the mirror. I sucked my bottom lip and narrowed my eyes, taking a deep breath.

You got this.

I opened the door with my elbow, ignoring the disapproving glare from the angry mother.

At the convenience store across from the bus fare booth, past racks of magazines and post cards, there was a counter where a bored clerk, not much older than I was, stood playing a scratch ticket.

"Have you ever won?" I asked her.

"Can I help you?" she asked, ignoring my question. She was chewing her gum loudly, like she had an entire gumball machine's worth in there.

"Yeah, um...do you know where the nearest library is?"

"Don't you have a phone?" she asked before snapping her gum loudly.

I shook my head. She looked suspiciously at my hand that was closed over my chest to give the spider more room. It was moving around in there, tickling my skin with it's feather light attempt at escape.

"Left on 19th, right onto Broadway. It'll be on your left, past the park," she told me.

"We're on 19th now?"

"Mhmm..."

"Left 19th, right Broadway," I whispered to myself to remember.

"That's what I said."

I exited through the big automatic doors, the same way I had come in. It was loud outside with sounds of traffic, and smelled heavy of exhaust from all the idling buses. I felt so overly sensitive to all the chaos, the way I always did after long stretches of quiet. The anxiety of being in a city was starting to creep its way in. But, I had a trick for this. I looked around at all the concrete and started to erase it piece by piece. I imagined the roads turning to rapids, barreling over bedrock, and the cars as salmon fighting the current. I turned the buildings into giant redwoods towering above us; cathedrals of ancient life. The rumbling buses morphed into water buffalo, and the low planes taking off from the nearby airport turned into eagles, soaring on warm updrafts, casting their long shadows, stretched by the low angle of the sun, across the open steppe of parking lots. And all of a sudden, the city didn't seem so threatening.

I walked along the sidewalk, imagining each slab of pavement was a rounded river stone to hop across. There was a concrete container garden next to a dumpster not too far away. It was quiet at that end of the terminal; the kind of place where you might expect to find a maintenance person on a smoke break or a teenager getting high. Empty water bottles and old chip bags were caught in the tall, ornamental grass, dragged there by the strange urban winds; once swirling and free, now streamlined by the sharp angles of the city.

I leaned over the concrete side and held out my hand. The spider was curled into a tight ball, but soon its legs started to unfold like petals. My palm must have felt nice and warm compared to the crisp air, but with a tilt of my hand, it tumbled down onto a leaf.

There was a hesitancy in how it explored the spiney veins of this new strange place that told me perhaps it had never been outside before, or if it had, it was a long time ago. I hoped it would be happy. It was spring. There was snow was still melting at the edge of the city where we drove in. Maybe it would get too cold and die, but at least this way it dies having felt the sun, and it would know there was more to this world than just white tiles and fluorescent lights. Knowing, to me, seemed better than not knowing. In my eyes, there's nothing that beautiful about a long life if it's spent in oblivion.

I fished a child size juice box from the grass and just as I squeezed a little sugary drop out on the leaf next to it, I heard something hard shatter against the pavement around the corner. With that one loud shatter, the fragile fantasy I'd masked the city with fell away, and the noise and chaos came flooding back. I looked up, past the dumpster to the alleyway that separated the main terminal from the garage. Low angry grunts and the sound of shuffling shoes followed. Then, I heard something not so hard smack against the brick.

"Get him boss!" shouted a nasally voice I vaguely recognized.

I looked back to where the buses were. The one I had gotten off of was still parked in its place with the driver out front sipping his coffee as passengers filed back in.

The pillar the boy was standing at earlier was now vacant, but a smouldering cigarette lay at the base of it.

Without thinking too much about what I was doing, I moved towards the sounds.