At the back of the bus alone - ready for 50 minutes of start, stop, up, down; all around.
A fire engine wails past with men we never thank enough at the wheel, its red rage reminiscent of my favourite football team, but that's no proper comparison - there are lives to be saved here.
The lives on the bus, on the other hand, are ones I will never touch; commuters may very easily pass the same person more than once yet never know of it. Two strangers like parallel lines - together, but hopelessly apart at the same time - à la the wisdom of Dire Straits' "Hand in Hand".
The beauty of bus rides is that the windows give you an excuse to look someplace else, whereas the train leaves your eyes hopelessly darting and looking for somewhere to land. Then I realise I've already used "hopelessly" in the paragraph above, but I'm tired and I just listened to "Let It Be" on my phone. I let it be.
Some guy yawns above the tinny music being savaged off his earphones. Some lady sneezes a while later and jolts everyone out of their dated daydreams. In that curious moment alone, all on the bus are one - until three blows of a nose later, and we retreat back into our cocoons.
Two rows in front, two men sit faced towards me. Both with their heads tipped back, eyes shut like all our mouths that dare not make a sound. The younger one in a polo tee with his hands clutching a duffel bag; the slightly older guy has his belongings resting on his lap, arms crossed like Raffles. I look across to the other side of the bus and their counterparts in the same row conveniently strike an identical pose. One is evidently a nurse - the kind our politicians degrade as 'low-skilled', but I look at her hands - layered with the folds of age, and still looking very steady, very sure. The other is hard to make out and hard to describe, though he has every potential to be that jack-in-a-box my end of the week needs.
I think how nice it'd be if they were all dreaming and each of their dreams appeared as holograms above their heads, so I could watch; different dreams for people with different lives, and yet asleep on a bus there is something remarkably similar about that purity of their exhaustion, that they are all now on the journey to loved ones, that in a few days time they will do this again, maybe even together, with a resounding tap of a card that linked us easy. It's not nice to intrude, even if it's a great joy to hear or learn about people's dreams, though, so I just pretend they're all dreaming the same thing.
I haven't got a clue what that dream could be. Still, in some not-so-distant place in their heads, I know there is a message, a call, a string of words - one they know in so many ways - tucked under tongues for this time of the day:
"I'm coming home."
