eternal spring

It doesn’t start with the bus card, of course, but when you tell it later that’s how you’ll remember it.

It starts with a girl in bright pink lipstick, bright-painted murals on the walls of an abandoned mall, and a really good latte. It comes together in between, a series of moments strung together by the kind of half-developed hysterical euphoria you could only call the thrill of exploration; it forms in the breathy sounds of a world you’re just beginning to understand, bubbling bright on the tip of your tongue. You feel your world take shape in the shy smile of a street food vendor, a new formation built by the hands of a two-year-old on the bus – he teaches you how to say the word “square.”

The lights of the city are soft and warm where they trickle through dirt-streaked windows, washing over your clothes, your hands where they lay folded on your lap. For an instant, you feel yourself change – your whiteness is gone, painted away by the very place that marks you as a foreigner. To your right, a child sings along to something on the radio, a song you remember. The music is cheerful if you don’t know what it means.

You’re scared.

You have to remind yourself of this, even as you sit alone on a bus to nowhere, feeling the force of a billion lives crowd you from the outside in. It’s almost midnight, and the city is alive, so forcibly real you can almost feel its pulse. This life is so close, but so entirely not your own – when neon lights paint across your hands, you half expect to see it shift beneath your skin.

There’s a strangeness to your presence here, the way the cobbles beneath your feet rise to swallow you into the night, even as your very flesh repels. You feel yourself start to fade into life here, a guilty sort of happiness growing like vines in the cracked pieces of your heart –

(But at the same time, you see the way they look at you, the confines of your body a physical barrier to where you end and their world begins. It traps you, holds you tight in a way you’ve never known before; when you try to speak the language, your own skin clenches too tight, choking the words in your throat.)

The word for foreigner has the same roots as the word for outer, outside, a linguistic technicality to explain what you already know to be true. At the same time, wind and rain whip at your body like shackles, the city that rejects you laying a claim on your very soul.

You don’t miss the mountains. You miss being able to use them as a reference point, a fixed singularity among spires of concrete and steel. Now you’re a stranger in a foreign country, and you don’t know which way is west.

The song ends, cutting out with a screech of static like a war cry. The bus trundles on.

Out a dirt-streaked window, you think you can see the stars.