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What have you been putting off doing? Why?

I thought I was gonna have to watch my grandma die on Thursday. It was only for a second. I wasn’t even sad: I was petrified. She’s collapsed on the grass—a dizzy spell from fasting and working outside—and I’m standing there thinking of what life would be like without her. I wouldn’t be in this tiny seat right now, pushing northbound: 12 of the 36 hours now behind me. Thankfully, her neighbor was talking to her outside, able to catch her and lay her down. I do feel terrible about leaving her after something like that. Leaving and the days leading up were supposed to feel good, but it felt shitty after that. For a day, I felt like Stan in that episode of South Park where everything he sees and hears is literal shit. I bought the tickets that night anyway. I still wanted to go, but it felt different than I imagined. It’s not even that I romanticized it, but a plan three years in the making is gonna have unforeseen side effects. I’m not the same angry lil’ guy anymore, trying to run away from his problems. If I thought I was making a mistake, I would’ve called it off. The idea was to just leave, me and my three bags, and explain myself afterward. I couldn’t do that to her. It felt really fucking bad to drop a bomb like this on my grandma on my last afternoon living with her. I don’t know why I’m so secretive. Maybe the answer lies less than two miles down the road in the house I grew up in.

I was gonna document how my feelings toward my leaving changed over the day-and-a-half of bus rides, but I don’t feel any reservations or butterflies. I feel so calm, so level. Packing only the essentials and moving my life to a new city feels no different than a commute to work. For four hours I had to sit in a bus station, waiting for my first transfer, and I literally did nothing. I helped an old lady use her credit card to buy Cheetos from the vending machine—which reminded me how my grandma thinks I’m a computer genius for setting up her new router and modem—and I updated my diary for an hour, but that was it. I just sat there and felt the rest of time.

Every time I see an old skinny White man with a white beard and an outfit I would wear, I swear I’m looking in a time travel mirror. I would love to make it to old age just to look like Noam Chomsky. I’m now on the second leg of my trip. Mr. Chomsky is sitting next to me. We’re wearing comparable khaki jackets and jeans. He has a gray skullcap with a small “S” on it. He doesn’t talk much, but he’s got a voice that’s higher than you’d expect; less gravelly too: it’s gentle, and I notice that he’s a conscientious person. Although he looks like the 94-year-old linguist, he rocks an Attack on Titan backpack and lifts himself up when he has to fart. Stopped at Brunswick, Chomsky randomly says that he’s never seen a Chinese bus driver before and then goes on to say how our driver seems much nicer than some of the nastier White drivers he’s had in the past. I love how matter-of-fact old people are about race, it’s refreshingly honest and hilarious. Anyone should be given the job if they’re good at it, he says. “Discrimination is illegal, ya know.” This guy fucking rocks. He shakes my hand and moves to the now empty pair of seats one row ahead in order to stretch out and sleep. If he is anything like me, he likely won’t be able to.

The fearmongering over taking any kind of bus is completely unwarranted. In my years of taking school buses, different city bus lines, and now Greyhound, I have never had a bad experience. Yeah, sometimes a person might smell a little bad or refuse to wear headphones, but who cares? I think this is my favorite way to travel. I would love high-speed rail as much as everyone else, but a bus just hits home. As it stands, I like it even better than Amtrak: it’s cheaper and takes the same amount of time to get where I need to go. I feel absolutely no anxiety about moving across the country to go live with someone I only “met” not even two weeks ago. I only have several thousand dollars, maybe half of all my winter clothes, and no job. What a day a diff’rence makes.