Crowded again this morning. Always when it’s cold, so many people just need a shelter for a moment, even if it moves, even if they kick you off when it gets to the end of the line. A man with no teeth sits in the front teeth, jawing, asks sloppily for the time. A well-dressed girl with pretty fingers and a thick book shakes back her sleeve and obliges him.
A girl is planted in the middle of the bus despite the crush of people boarding at Downing. The man behind me asks politely but loudly to move back. We all proceed to the back.
There are spots in the back, untaken. I sit across from the roadblock girl and notice she is carrying creamy coffee in a spaghetti sauce jar. I do this often and I smile and I want to tell her how I always feel less crazy when I see someone else do it. But I’ve learned from experience that talking about “crazy,” even in a somewhat colloqial sense, is not usually a good way to start a conversation on the bus.
It is then that I notice her eyes, and from then on I can’t stop stealing glances at them. The lightest lightest gray, as close to white as you could get without looking monstrous. The color of smoke. The color of river stones. Like the sky when you can’t see clouds because the whole sky is a cloud.
I can’t help myself, but each time I see her startling eyes, I think of some writerly way to describe them. Grey like what green looks like in a black and white movie. Grey like a baby goose. Grey like sunbleached cement.
I find myself wondering if it runs in her family. I imagine the same white-grey eyes staring out onto Salisbury Plain or up at castle spires in some Teutonic mountain valley. I imagine a family portrait at the turn of the century, two generations of the eyes staring out.
I try to make a point of not staring at her, but staring out into nothing. Staring on the bus is not acceptable, this is how you differentiate between people who are just trying to get to work and those who don’t have anywhere else to go.
The bus stumbles down Colfax, slowly. I’m late for work. It’s icy out, I respect the committment to safety, but I’m frustrated nonetheless. I notice that right as I finally get to my stop, as I stand up to leave, the grey eyes briefly meet mine. I blink and turn away, shuffling through legs, arms, coats and bags to exit. Everything on the bus is momentary. Touch, sight, people, space. Blink and it’s over.
