I rested my head against the bus window. From the library to the gas station, the scenery passed by the window, almost frighteningly familiar since I took this route everyday. Would there come a day I could leave this scenery behind? I felt that it was impossible to predict what tomorrow would bring, nor to hope for anything.
There was a woman sitting in front of me, her hair tied with a yellow rubber band. Her shoulders lifted and then dropped as if she was sighing. Then she rested her head against the window. For around a month already, we had studied at the same library and gotten on the bus at the same stop. We hadn’t spoken a word to each other, but we looked at the same scenery and lived on the same time and sighed the same sighs. The hair tie was still in my pant’s pocket.
The woman always got off the bus three stops before I did. Every time I saw her leave, I wondered if she was going to distribute fliers. What kind of time was she spending, what kind of things was she enduring? How strongly did she feel stifled at the thought that tomorrow might not come, or that from the beginning there had never been such a thing as tomorrow? I thought things like that.
The woman’s stop began to approach. Someone pressed the stop request button and other passengers stood up from their seats. But in the midst of this, that woman didn’t stir. She just stayed in her seat, her head against the window. It seemed like she was asleep. Should I go and wake her? I fought with myself for a moment. The bus approached the stop. The woman didn’t move. People disembarked. The door closed and the bus started to move.
The woman didn’t wake, even as we passed the next three stops. As I moved to the bus door I fought with myself again. It was clear that once I got off the bus, no one else would pay attention to her. She would wake up somewhere far from her stop, and it was impossible to know how much more tired she would be today because of it.
I left the bus stop and started to walk toward the gas station. The bus took off and I didn’t look back. I had left the hair tie on top of her bag, but that was it. That wasn’t a beginning, and as such nor was it an end. It was nothing to start with and there was no reason for it to be anything. So I thought it really didn’t matter.