Listen to me. This is what ur gonna want to do. Ur gonna have to go to a party. Its like the same party you’ve been to 500 times but ur gonna go anyways bc its so so cool to be invited to parties. And ur girlfriend can’t come to the party and you’re vaguely happy about this for reasons you don’t want to think about. You will be fine at the party. You will drink a little bit and smoke quite a lot and play flip cup and irish uno and chat normally and make a few unremarkable faux pas. When everyone is in the backyard you’re gonna want to go inside to pee and then make a break out the front door to the bus stop. You will wait about eight minutes for the bus, which will arrive almost exactly on time. You can listen to anything you want on your big headphones as long as it’s one of the downloaded podcast episodes you’ve listened to dozens of times already. You will wonder if anyone at the party will worry about you disappearing abruptly, then you’ll feel like an asshole for fantasizing about people worrying about you. When you’re the last passenger on the bus, you’re gonna want to start rolling your shoulders and stretching your neck. The bus driver will start yelling at you while you’re at a red light and it will take you a while to respond because of the headphones and because you’ve never been yelled at by a bus driver before and you’re not sure what he wants and you’ll still be a little stoned. But you’re going to want to take your headphones off and go talk to to him. He’s going to ask you about your stretches, but really he wants to tell you that he started stretching years ago, when he saw a woman like you, stretching on the bus. And it helped him because he was having a really hard time. Because he used to drive trains instead of a bus. He was a train conductor for five years before he hit a man who jumped in front of his train. He just jumped, the bus driver will tell you, making his finger into a hook and doing a little hopping gesture with it. The man was spread out all over the tracks. The first responders asked him if he wanted to see the body and he said Why would I want to see? I already saw it. It was everywhere. This bus driver will seem understandably distraught by this retelling. You will wonder how often he shares this with passengers. You are going to want to ask him some questions about what it’s like to be a bus driver, and by the time he drops you off at the train station, the conversation is cheerful. He makes $55/hour with great benefits. When you get off the bus, you’re going to have to put your headphones back on and jog for about three blocks uphill, even though you never ever run unless you’re trying to catch a bus. You can walk the rest of the way home if you want but it’s ok if you need to run a little more. You’ll pass a hair salon with its OPEN sign still blinking red and blue even though its dark inside and nearly midnight. Send a snapchat to your friends, including some from the party, that’s captioned, “time for a Night Haircut”. Your denim miniskirt will rotate all the way around your body on the way home. It won’t be until you’re home, in bed, podcasts off, that you’ll think: I’ve thought about jumping in front of a train before. Not recently, but there was a time when I thought about it a lot. I thought about hopping like a bunny rabbit right down onto the tracks. Could the bus driver tell? There’s nothing else to do. Brush your teeth. Take your meds. Go to sleep!
accidentally switched google street view to night mode. now it’s night time on all the streets… buildings are all dark. the windows are red with silhouettes. if you click to zoom in they duck down real quick
ALT
