I’m sitting in the bus terminal in New York City, waiting for the invariably but unusually late Greyhound home after visiting my ex-girlfriend, current best friend, person which whom I have a hard-to-describe but central-to-my-being relationship. Our relationship feels like it has completed a two-year cycle, like we’re back to the place where you know you like each other but haven’t decided what to do about it yet. Really it’s like that except that we’re a lot closer and usually less awkward and have the ability to say “I love you.” And, well, that she has a girlfriend. So it’s not really cyclical at all—it’s really something different and strange—but it still feels like that. Since I can’t much describe how things actually are, that sense of how they feel will have to suffice.
So I’m in New York surrounded by a couple hundred people waiting for these damn busses. It’s almost cliche that each has a story, but it’s true. That’s mine.
I wait longer and pull out my notebook again. This kind of crowding never happens, people say. There are always cops here, say the New Yorkers. Where are they? Cell phone reception is good enough only for the occasional text message, and in my Greyhound travels I haven’t found the “select terminals” that have WiFi, so there isn’t really any source for news. Busses normally come in and out continuously, say those more traveled than I. Everyone worries silently that something is wrong in the world outside, but that seems somehow detached from our problem, which is simply that we can’t get a bus.
Eventually, hours later, I get on a bus to Pittsburgh and from there travel home, arriving thirteen hours late and never making it to Chicago as I had planned to at what then seemed the last minute. I don’t know whether this delay had anything to do with heightened security in New York due to rumors of a dirty bomb attack by al-Qaeda, but the absense of police may well have.