the roaming diaries: commuter's interlude
Welcome to entry one of the roaming diaries, a new category on grace, uninterrupted that is dedicated to the who, what, when, where, and why components of my own mobility. Places take on new meanings once you’ve shared them with someone, or when you revisit them alone.
In the years, months I’ve spent learning the different routes of Cleveland’s public transportation system, I’ve also left pieces of myself around the city. In coffee shops, museum galleries, work tables at libraries, park benches, bar stools, the block I walk down almost every day to get to my house after running errands, even bus seats.
I went into the spring semester in a sleepy haze, not at all filled with that tingly-new-semester feeling that includes the rush of new and familiar faces and new syllabi dates to adjust to. It felt like I never left school, literally - I spent most of winter break scanning ISBN numbers and auditing rental book returns when I wasn’t hostessing. Before I knew it, it was the Sunday night before the first day of classes, a month of no tests or essays gone in the blink of an eye and a halt to the luxury of binge-watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine without a looming 11:59 P.M. deadline.
Commuting in the winter is a whole different experience compared to the rest of the year. In the mornings, still groggy from hitting the snooze button on my alarm three times too many, and flustered from the blast of air after opening my front door, I trudge my way to my usual bus stop. I jam my heaphones into my ear (in the new year, my wired headphones have reached antiquity status due to the rise of AirPods) and mouth a quick “Hi” to the bus driver when I flash my school ID while boarding. Fellow passengers share the same tired facial expression as me, cheeks still tinted red from the cold. I sit down and settle into my own soundtrack, usually Beach House or Hippo Campus, or if I’m less lethargic, Queen.
When my bus reaches the part of the highway that has a view of Downtown Cleveland’s skyline, especially when it’s sunny outside, I imagine myself to be in a low-budget indie film - you know, the kind with an opening panoramic shot with lens flare. It’s nice to have the buildings serve as a form of consistency; they’re always there, but every morning it feels like I’m seeing them for the first time with almost childlike wonder. There’s so much that a city contains, and on a much deeper level, so much that we don’t know about, what’s forgotten and remembered by people we cross paths with.
When we get to the corner of Ontario and Lakeside Avenue, I’m transported back to last August, the night I met the guy I briefly dated last summer. The two of us are walking around Downtown Cleveland, exchanging pleasantries and stories. Although the sky was cast in dark violet, the night wasn’t ominous because the streets were covered in pools of light from traffic lights, street lamps, and buildings overhead. And we were accompanied by the giddiness of meeting each other for the first time, wanting to know as much as we could fit in the span of a few hours. I can’t help but feel less innocent when I tell someone my name. The memory makes me smile, and I look across the aisle of the bus and see him again, this time a week and a half or so after that first night. He’d never been on a westbound bus before, let alone the suburbs of Cleveland. I sensed his apprehensiveness when the bus rolled along the Shoreway and flashed him reassuring small smiles every few minutes. I know where we’re going. I grabbed a book from my bag and pretended to read, my eyes scanning the same sentence over and over again. The sun was shining through his side of the bus and reflected light off of my hair and the text on my page. I could feel him watching me, and I didn’t want to look at him again because even then, I knew it would hurt. In the present, I’m reading Alex Dimitrov’s poetry collection Together and by Ourselves, stuck on the line from “All Apologies”: Let me be obvious. We’re both leaving and here.
When I catch glimpses of the past during my commute, never do I think to myself, I wish I’d known then what I do now. I learn from things as they’re happening. Like I said before, there are pieces of me all over the city, skin of a former self that I’d shed when leaving somewhere. When I remember moments that contain people I’m not in contact with anymore, they don’t spark sadness at all. Only a revelation: I’m doing what I’ve always done, with or without them. It’s winter now and I’m a second-semester-senior on her way to poetry workshop and American Lit II and Foundations of Quantitative Literacy (math) and my head bobs in unison with everyone around me when the bus hits a pothole.