It’s so lonely being me.

I wake each morning and work myself into a stupor and I try so very hard, and I see that very horrid truth that is my undeniable loneliness. My jacket is too small for my long arms, but it’s too big for my shoulders. The wind nips at my forearms, and I cough, more out of feigned need than anything else. I am waiting for the bus, and I am alone, though I am surrounded on all sides. Behind me, a man fiddles with his watch. I sniff my nose. The woman sitting on the bench scoots away from me. Maybe I actually am sick? Huh. The bus pulls up, a loud monster of smog and steel.

Here I am, no room for my soul, and to heat for my bones. The man with his watch is sitting ahead of me, and his watch is in his pocket now, maybe the band broke. There is a small child next to me. Thirteen? Maybe fourteen? Quiet, looking out the window into the gray nothingness that is the passing world outside the bus. Six stops left till mine.

A man in a wheelchair gets on the bus, and I scream internally. Slowly, so slowly, we move to make room for him, and slowly, so slowly, he gets strapped into the appropriate spot. He is fat, with a beard that looks as though a robin wouldn’t want to nest in it. The smell isn’t pleasant either, but it blends itself in with the general stench of the crowded bus. Five, then four stops till mine.

I feel a general looseness in my right nostril, and I sniff my nose again. I turn to look for the woman from the bench, but I cannot find her. The child next to me glances at my, and almost seems to tell me to leave, but they don’t. Too bad. It’s been a while since someone has said anything to me. Three stops now.

We stop at a red light, and the steady roar of a motorcycle come up next to us. I see the rider, looking like a tumour growing from the back of some mechanical beast, his face hidden by a magical helmet. He turns to the bus, and I can see our reflection in the cold black of his visor. He is an alien, I decide. He has no face, and he is trying to steal mine. Well, let him. I don’t use mine anyway, my brow gets in the way of anything I try to do anyway. The light is green now, and the cancerous alien fairy vanishes. Two stops away.

The music in the bus is a loud staticy garbage pile. There is a black man towards the front of the bus who seems to like it. He is nodding his head to the tune, if it can be called that. His right eye is glossy, like a poorly lacquered table. His necklace of links shines when he turns his body toward the passenger next to him as they some thing that has switched his attention from the musical noise. The driver hits a bump, and the black man’s necklace jumps up like a pixie. Only one more stop til mine.

I check my phone- empty. They is an irritation on my upper right arm, and I pick at it. My fingers come away with blood and pus on them, and I nonchalantly wipe the on my jeans. I sit up straighter and my efforts are rewarded with a satisfying crack along the length of my spine. I twist around, attempting to finish off the rest of it, and lock eyes with a woman who is just pretty enough so that no one would tell her the truth that she was repulsive. Her lips are pulled apart in disgust, and her teeth are like gravestones ready to call the dead to them. I pull my gaze away from the empty lady and watch as the bus stops for the hour that will be needed to get the wheel-man off of the bus. My stop is next.

The child next to me is playing with their hair, and it is a greasy mess. I can see myself in the child, not as a rapist, as some of you might think, but as if I was a child again, and as if I rode the bus, dirty and sad and lonely. I think, and remember when I was thirteen, and I thought that the world was happy, and that whatever I did I could make a difference, that I could change things, and make the gray into colour. I thought I could make things. I would have made people smile, and I would have friends and I would love and be loved and I am tired now. It does not do me well to think past about myself, because the disconnect between my current self is too much. I think, though, that if I tried my hardest, if I really put myself to-

It’s my stop.

I get off the bus, and remember that it’s cold. There is a tree, and it is dead, or nearly so, and I see it and I feel colder. The bus coughs black death in the air, and I make my way to the sprawling campus where I make the money that allows me to die at the slowest pace possible.

I walk past dreamers, and smilers, and realists, idiots and geniuses alike. Genitors of the future. I see their world painted in yellow and red and green and blue. They are loud, and proud, and the cannot be stopped because they are young, and life has yet to cut out their still beating heart and brandish it madly into the air, showering them in their own slowly leaking ichor. They have yet to realize that whatever change you make, the Devil has you in his palm nonetheless, and that God is a sick delusion of the depraved and the greedy bigots.

I open my door and walk to my desk. Three students are sitting in the room already, not quite yellows and reds with them, more blues and gray. They are tired, but they still hope. Ha. There is a garbled mess on the whiteboard, and I make my way to erase it. There’s this bit here, incessant. I push the eraser into it, and ever so slowly this small dark spot of the gleaming whiteness disappears.

A few more hapless souls drift in on the chill wind. Some bits of paper on the wall flutter against their pins. One of the students has a cup of coffee, and the smell of it is bitter and warm. It reminds me that I haven’t eaten yet today, and a small ache opens its eyes it the pit of my belly. It shifts around, looking for some comfort, for some peace, but finally it lies back down and passes into sleep. How I wish all life was that easy. To simply sleep the troubles away. How long then would I have to sleep? Would I even wakeup in this life?

The clock ticks down the minutes until I begin my dissection of these young minds. Soon I shall open for them a door that will not shut. A pathway to a world that is gray and awful. I think back to the bike-man. I named him, but in truth, I am more the alien, so disconnected from my own species. I let out a soft sigh, and wait slowly for the lost ones to trickle in.

I clear my throat and begin my preaching.

Next Chapter: Mr. Stephen Driscoll