It comes like buses

The lady on the phone did not so much give me directions as tell me a story about how I might experience my journey to the bus depot; you wanna go under the highway and after a while you’ll see Fran’s hamburgers where you take a left and once you see the stadium on your right you wanna follow any one of the driveways and find someone to help you, just ask anyone, there’ll be someone around. I was scribbling her instructions down in the middle of Target, hoping to find my way there via a list of landmarks in a part of town I had never been to.

Clear directions are hard to come by right now.

The bus depot is somewhere behind the highway, where the buildings are spare, flat and industrial and the sky huge and sharp blue. I was there to collect my son’s left-behind backpack on the first day of the long summer vacation. I walked to the office through rows and rows of buses, lined up blankly; unburdened of the lost property, sticky windows and quotidian tasks of a full season. Inanimate buses. Ready but route-less.

Life, it seems, is like a row of buses.

I’m about to have a baby, about to move (I know not where), about to either get my visa renewed or prepare to leave the country and if we do go back, there’s the where, what & how to negotiate…Everything is about to. All at once about to.

It’s a moment that makes me want to say “goodness” in both senses of the word, a perfect pun which pleases me greatly. It’s overwhelming but not without beauty. When you can’t see far, you notice the ground under your feet a little more, feel the echoes of a happy, fat season and unload all of the lost property. You think about what you want next.

I like these brooding moments before change when you can easily name your hopes–the only markers you have to navigate by. As for street names, forget it, I’m in a story not a blueprint. Honestly, I’d probably prefer the blueprint right now but it would seem I am being stretched in more ways than one and like the Austin summer, it’s probably best not to fight it.

For now, all I can say is that I’ve cleaned out my buses, they’re lined up and ready. And pretty soon, I’ll have some good tales to tell of what all the about tos came to.