The bus ride to LAX felt like galloping into the sunset at the end of a cowboy movie, except after disappearing into a tiny spot at the edge of the horizon, all that awaited was another vast piece of barren land, and another, and another, for me to disappear into. The sunlight outside was a murky yellow that tainted the trees with a sickly hue. Shiny white apartment buildings leaned into dirty yellow complexes, a visual summary of before and after thirty years in LA. There was a Target and a CVS and a torn-down seven-eleven all packed up in one block, and the next block was a psychic boutique, tire replacement shop, and taco food truck 3-in-1. The bus jerked and jolted as the driver swerved, and I tried my best to keep my balance so that I could still see the subtle differences between each stretch of land, enough to convince myself that the bus was still headed somewhere.
Bus rides are pretty much my only opportunities to interact with parts of LA and America that isn’t campus, where everywhere you walk you see flowers and green trees flourishing upon the money and labor pulsing under your feet, and for me to see fully fleshed out people, with significant others and grandchildren and bags of groceries, responsibilities that aren’t just going to classes, worries that balloon beyond getting a B, and weekend plans that are more than grabbing lunch and studying together. I tried to observe some of them but found that I was too dizzy from my motion sickness, so I closed my eyes. The last thing I saw was a beige two-story apartment and the dusty sedan steering in.
I thought about all the places I’d traveled to in America. A day trip to New York on another bus, trapped in traffic to pass through an underpass to actually get into New York. There was a guy lounging in his red convertible breathing in the exhaust from all the trucks and buses waiting with us, and I whispered that’s got to be really bad for your lungs. When we were finally there we went to the Met and I almost died from the excitement. Sunlight spilled in through the roof into the room that housed the Egyptian temple, and we sat beside the water after exploring all the collections, envying the locals strolling leisurely, some with kids in tow, as if all of this was the most natural thing to do on any Saturday afternoon. A three-week stay in suburban New Jersey, where to walk my friend’s baby cousin to the bus stop, we passed by a lush meadow where my friend pointed out blue jays. On the last day of school, my friend’s uncle drove us to the carnival, the sky light blue against my friend’s delighted screams on flying swings. That night we had chocolate cake. Three months in Santa Clara, where I got used to seeing this cute couple waiting for the bus together, the guy leaving to catch another bus minutes before ours would arrive, the girl texting him throughout the ride. From what I could make out sitting three rows behind the girl, her phone’s wallpaper was their prom photo. When I moved to another airbnb and had to start taking another bus to work, I wondered if they ever wondered about me. On the bus back from work I’d sometimes see this homeless old man, who boarded one day with a big scratch on his elbow that had barely started to scab. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him as his injured arm hung lifelessly against his frame, the wound brushing against his grayish white shirt, leaving faint specks of blood, all while he stared outside, at the traffic that had started to build up. I started taking a different bus the next day, the old man slumped on the bus seat, his arm with the scabs like flaking fish scales too much for me to see.
I opened my eyes as the bus limped to a stop. The city bus center. I got off, no longer worried about getting off at the wrong stop after three years in LA, as a plane took off in the distance. There was a gray sign that read “LAX shuttle” beside an employee-only parking lot and a small line of people already waiting, so I dragged my orange suitcase over. A couple minutes later, a man swaggered over and started singing “Jesus, oh Jesus,” shaking a cup half full of melting ice cubes and pacing along the line of waiting passengers. If I’d been alone I would’ve seriously started freaking out, but since there were others I settled for inching farther away when he wasn’t looking. Whenever he got louder, closer, I would stare at the golden line piercing through the middle of his white, pointy left shoe. The shoes that had carried him here and made him cut in front of me to board the gray shuttle that finally pulled in. On our shuttle to LAX, he and his shoes continued to sing their song about Jesus. I closed my eyes and wondered when we’d finally get there.