(20/05/26) If I leave the front door early and walk around the block and up the hill and cross the empty roads twice to get to the bus stop, I will get there before the bus arrives. This fact somehow always escapes me.
It takes roughly the same amount of time for me to reach that stop than it does for the bus to come up from the highway and meander through the suburb to reach it too. This seems simple in theory, but some days the highway is less busy and it only takes one change of fluorescent traffic lights for the bus to slip off the highway than other days, when it takes two. Sometimes it takes three. Some days it’s because I leave in the morning, and the school and work and business rush halts the bus a little longer, but some days I leave closer to noon and forget that there’s a difference. I forget leaving isn’t the same as deciding now is the time to go. Some days they’re the same; some days there’s one more thing to put in my bag or one thing I forgot to do or one more pet downstairs that I have to give my farewells to, and then the bus has escaped the busy highway and I track it on the app on my phone and watch as it takes the twists and turns of the streets I’ve known since childhood, the green line of its unwavering path slowly being consumed by forgotten grey as I scamper around the block and pant all the way up the hill. I still get to the bus stop early, and then I have to deal with being early. The decades old kindle in the bottom of my bag calls out to me as a way to pass the time, but there’s never enough time; the little icon denoting the bus is just around that corner, which means it’s really already coming up the street—and there it is.
I missed the bus once. I had to race up the hill also, panting still, and watch as it flew past. The stop was only a few metres away. I walked back home and felt the time slipping away from me and festering somewhere unreachable. I left for the next bus before it got to the intersection on the highway, and had to wait ten minutes at the bus stop, on the rotten wooden bench under the wilting tree.
Some days, scarcely, I walk the extra distance to the highway itself. I walk past my old primary school. It feels like poetry in and of itself—I went the other way for high school, and now here I am, back in the same neighbourhood to get to university, only this time I’m walking and travelling miles further than both other times—it’s like a bad metaphor for my slowly and surely and unstoppably growing up.
I pull out my bus card (that I now, incredibly, horrifyingly, pay for myself). Smile at the bus driver. Sometimes they smile back, sometimes they greet me and I fumble over myself to greet them back with my barely-used voice, sometimes they don’t spare a glance. The bus ride to the train station seems to take forever and no time at all. The route winds through two suburbs, then back to the highway where it stretches out languidly beside the river, then back up again into a third suburb as the river curls away again. The ground flattens out but the buildings reach higher and higher and higher, and then the bus is on the highway again and is rumbling on top of the bridge over the river itself and the water below sparkles when there are no clouds. Sometimes I read, sometimes I listen to mp3s stripped from the internet on my decades-old music player. Sometimes neither; sometimes both. The station is on the other side of the river, and it’s where I get off and get the second bus to uni. It’s shorter. Fuller, most days; more young adults like myself travelling from one of their closest train stations to university. The bus comes more frequently; I have choices of which bus I want to get to reach the same destination. The whole journey takes maybe forty minutes. I have to leave half an hour early because the bus from my house only comes once an hour. I’m early to every class. I miss that same bus on the way back and have to take the other one, walk up from the highway past my primary school in the late sunlight or steadily encroaching dark.
University is big and full of people and somehow also impossibly empty. There are never any free seats anywhere. I don’t know anyone by name. Its busyness terrifies me; people rushing from place to place, class to class, lecture to lecture, eating early or late or not at all, taking notes for class in a different one, staring longingly, carelessly, at phone screens at any available opportunity.
There’s not much in actuality to complain about. Lecturers who lecture but not teach, classmates that do the work but not chat with you. Classes that have to be taken to get closer to the course you want but aren’t ever, can’t ever be sure of. Math. The future costs of it all; if I don’t pass this class it’s four hundred dollars accumulating extra cents somewhere in the dark until I can afford to pay for it, but I still went to the class, spent the lecturer’s time, it was my first semester so it was a learning experience after all, it’s worth it; I’ll have to pick up an extra class later down the line, maybe. If I can handle the workload by then. If I even get into the double degree I want. If I still want it by then. I’m not taking math next semester. I have to take electrical systems and computer programming and engineering mechanics and materials and processing. Skills and industry-specific knowledge. I’m not even in the engineering course yet. Do I want to be? Do I want to be the same as my classmates, who complain about the work and the effort but live far closer and took the right classes in high school to get them here sooner, easier, who want to stay here in this city and work to warm the climate further in one of two impossibly rich industries. Do I want to be the same as them?
I dream of low-gravity. Daydream of reactors spinning so fast and heated so close to the temperature of the sun that the atoms within lose their grip on reality and tumble apart and together again, tighter, closer, less space between. I mourn the stars, driving through the city at night with a dark and dull sky miles above; know they’re there beyond the greedy excess of light down here below that hides them from our sight. Know ‘down here, below’ is so horridly incorrect it’s laughable. Did you know a vacuum is impossible to create in reality? That a temperature of absolute zero is impossible to reach? That atoms attract each other as surely and with the same blind force as people do? That light behaves so strangely that they still can’t decide whether it’s a wave of energy or a particle with mass, and the models we use switch between them almost arbitrarily? That these are our only real limits, in this universe? We learnt this together, do you remember? Did you understand?
My classmates, already in the engineering course, learnt it with me or before me, but only inasmuch so that they pass. So they can pencil it down on an exam paper and let it slip from their memory. So they can get their degree and get out. So they can make the money that engineers make in this part of the country.
I took art in high school, not physics. I wrote poetry in primary school and always picked the narrative options on english exams. It’s curiosity that drives me. It’s wonder that alienates me. I want to move over east when I graduate to study more. I won’t have the money. I take the bus every day and grieve the loss of time that I could instead spend wastefully, or productively; not quite knowing sure which yet but knowing I can’t anyway and that I would have liked the choice.
I have friends, of course, throughout this; high school friends each of whom I love but barely tell them so out loud. We took art together. They’ve continued it, whilst I’ve found artistry in other things they think of as more difficult or exceptional or respectable as a career. I wonder how they go through their lives without understanding the very nature of how their lives are gone through, how every synapse fires and molecule binds and atom comes together. I’m sure their varied and entirely individual religious or spiritual beliefs come into it at least somewhat. Content to understand the shape of the universe to—in my own personal opinion—some shallow degree, filling in the blanks where carelessness or forgetfulness or piety or some other thing I can’t begin to understand allows, whilst I am enough an atheist that the only definition of faith, to me, is what I have in each of them.
Because I must, when they are creating and studying and drawing and I am simply learning, have faith that they still understand the core of my being, when they do not understand the content I immerse myself in. When they don’t understand my dreams of weightlessness.
I spoke to another person from high school not continuing art. She told me how strange it was, creating for creation’s sake once again, the absence of assessment on the matter. I nodded along because I couldn’t tell her I didn’t know. That wonder at the world and my frenzy in learning it had robbed me of my ability to draw, to write, to breath life into something that hadn’t existed moments before. Writing this feels like taking a deep breath after a long dive and gasping for air, the harshness of the intake drying my throat as my slightly atrophied limbs struggle to keep my head above water, even as my mind goes immediately to the nature of the action. Nitrogen and carbon dioxide and oxygen entering my lungs, oxygen absorbed into my bloodstream and taken where it is needed. Sighing out a different breath of air. I nodded along as if I understood and as if the act of creation was any different from the act of learning; if art was any different from science; as if the necessary act of breathing did not release the carbon dioxide created like molecular masterpieces within your blood. I tell people I want to be an engineer at parties and they act vaguely surprised, and to be honest I’m not even sure why. I say it like it’s a brand, like I’m almost embarrassed to be telling anybody. ‘Wow, really?’ they say, congratulate me. The next words out of my mouth always have something to do with the workload, or the math, as if I really mind. They share they’re not doing math anymore, are glad of it. I say I wished I did the other math class in high school, so I didn’t have to do it now. It’s a half-truth. I would have to do more advanced maths. I want that so badly I cannot speak anymore, so I take another sip. The alcohol is broken down in my body, enzymes moulding over it and tearing apart the molecule into something toxic.
My mind is always on my future. Which tests I can fail and still pass the class itself, which classes I have to take next, when I can switch courses into my double degree. What I would study for a Masters or PhD. Would I pick something in chemistry? Physics? Nuclear engineering and fusion energy? All three of them? Some days I say it’s looking more and more like the latter. Other days I say I want to go straight to working, save some money; it sounds terribly boring to my own ears.
Secretly, and what I will not say aloud, is that my dreams where gravity is only a suggestion are bleeding into my waking world. I imagine what moving in microgravity is really like; all the astronauts and cosmonauts and media about space explain it, but I know that can be nothing like experiencing it yourself. Is it like swimming through air? If so, I imagine I would be a natural at it. Does the air give you enough resistance for it to feel like swimming? Can you twist and curl your body the way you would in water, or do you have to crawl along with your hands like a gecko on glass? Is that simply the safety protocol, to be attached at all times, lest you drift into the middle of the room, untethered, and find it is not at all like swimming and you cannot shift your weight and drift back to somewhere with purchase and instead must, flailing, float and hope a limb hits something solid? I think I don’t want anyone to tell me, because I want to find out myself, and anyway asking would mean saying I am interested in the subject out loud and that may be too much for other people to know. An admission I cannot take back and am not sure if I can actually live up to. I want, desperately, viciously, to be able to live up to. I can’t remember a time I didn’t feel this way, though I know it must only have been a few months ago when my life seemed to have an end point of high school exams and existence beyond that was an unattainable dream in and of itself. Now that the rest of my life has opened up before me, my more artistic dreams are slowly coming back and half-formed ambitions I didn’t know I had are floating, weightless, to the surface; allowed to expand like gas depressurised and fill the container of my mind as the bus crests another hill.