7/10/26

I feel like an Edward Hopper painting, which is to say, it is nighttime, I am alone, and I am eating at a diner in a distinctly American city. I have a bum leg going on four-and-a-half weeks, which has kept me home, ruining my plans for some grand unemployed summer, my neck hurts to turn left, so it’s a pain to look out the window, my haircut looks horrible at its awkward length, my acne is acting up, and none of the above is helped by the fact that my compounding irritation will continue stewing across several bus trips over the course of the next two—almost—days. And on top of that, I can’t write. But, I always say I can’t write until I end up surprising myself like an amnesiac coming out of a fugue to the sight of his own hands bloodied, his head splintered with unblunted confusion and hung with guilt-ridden resignation. I have accepted that I really have no control over it. It seems like every few months I have to write something to this effect, where I embarrass myself with my own complaining, the bemoaning of my own abilities, but I suppose it has to be done. I have to answer when I am called, compelled to stubbornly reassert my own self-will even in the face of my increasing and unrelenting drive toward self-effacement—the presence of absence.

I recognize the singer as Alanis Morrisette but couldn’t tell you the name of the song. The server puts down my check. Unbeknownst to either of us, my breakfast for dinner was served by a man with the same name as me. In that moment of recognition, it’s enough to make me want to weep. Nirvana’s “All Apologies” queues next as if in a playlist divinely shuffled and now I can really feel an outburst welling up. Now, I wish I had earbuds with me in one of my bags, but I’ve put to rest that habit of constantly carrying and wearing them. How long has it been? Months? A year? Years? Everything feels like it was just yesterday. I contemplate going to the bathroom, so I can finally cry for the first time in god knows how long, but I wait too long. By the time I’m face to face with the tired image of myself looking back at me for answers, the moment has passed. At least I don’t look as ugly as I had been picturing in my head.

A former coworker who got fired the same day as me starts texting that they’re through with incest porn after seducing their deceased father in a dream, making me want to laugh before stopping because I’ll—almost—cry again. It’s like the woman in the diner on my birthday.

The feng shui of my single booth was fucked, awkwardly placing her profile directly in my sight line across the dining room at her windowed four-top. I even considered moving almost immediately after sitting down, but that’s just how it goes when you’re told to sit anywhere you like but would still feel guilty about taking a larger table even when no one’s there. It didn’t really matter anyway until she walked in and filled that seat. She ordered red wine, a hamburger, and not long after put noise-canceling headphones over her ears. It looked like she was fighting a war of attrition against the thought of crying in public. I felt bad for finding her so attractive in that moment; I felt worse for staring, hoping her bespectacled fish face would turn to look at and recognize in me what I have so far been extracting from her. I don’t think she looked over once—no, I think she did, but it was as if I simply wasn’t there at all. After her meal, she turned right and looked out the window onto the rain I had failed to account for that had led me here in the first place.

I’m the last person to leave before 10 PM and I want to tell the young man with the closing shift that everything’s going to be just fine.

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Pancake Breakfast Combo 14.49
(2) pancakes, (2) eggs, (2) strips of bacon, (2) sausage links

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10:46 PM

Washed my face for the night at the Philadelphia Transportation Center. There’s an AMC across the street, but when I checked showtimes right after buying my bus ticket none of them lined up with my layover. Three years ago, we stayed on S Broad St, which is how I learned about the diner, though we never ate there. I even found the Airbnb we stayed at strolling down Maps street view. If my leg wasn’t dead weight, I’d walk over myself and get a picture. But, I really opted for these four hours in Philly since we met a woman while we were there and I might kill the time with her before the next leg to DC. A day after my asking, she got back to me to say she would love to but regretfully cannot since she no longer lives there. We were almost roommates, but I was fearful and stubborn, dead set on being 100 miles northeast. The ticket had already been bought, so the plans don’t really change.

7/11/26

I feel like God a couple hours outside of Atlanta.

Atlanta is an absolute free-for-all. I’ve been picked up on the side of the road during peak Midtown congestion, ushered outside onto a bus in Philly at midnight, surrounded by people sleeping outside waiting for their transfer in DC, stopped at stations that feel like someone’s living room (Raleigh) or been squeezed into overcrowded terminals (Charlotte) while the bus is refueled, and stretched my legs at gas stations in the middle of nowhere, but nothing compares to the warzone of the ATL bus terminal. Trash is everywhere, mostly plastic wrappers and food from the vending machines, clearly most of the people have already been here for hours, half the arrival/departure displays don’t work, the street side of the building has high windows since it’s built into a hill while the gate side is parallel to a subway station, so you feel like you’re underground from either direction, and the most famous strip club and chicken wings in the country are across the street.

It feels like certain people within these walls might snap if you accidentally hold eye contact for too long, like the guy across from me, leaning on a cardboard box full of his belongings and eating cold water cup noodles. He calls his girlfriend presumably to ask when she’ll be home, making it seem like he specifically elected to wait here with the rest of us rather than anywhere else. Most of the people in the row across from me looked like they could be vaguely homeless but actually aren’t. At the end of the row, closest to the glass doors of the boarding gates, is a woman who looks to be in her early twenties. There’s something feral about her, though she seems so disturbingly calm for someone hiding darting eyes under her hair, and even though I am the one who is watching her it feels like she is the one stalking me. I imagine she’s on the run from something: the purple hair dye on her neck and fingers as she ravenously stuffs a microwaved pizza into her mouth and wipes the retroreflective orange grease from her mouth and already indigoed hands onto the synthetic fabric of her leggings. Maybe it’s just because she looks like someone I used to know.

After studying the bus schedule and the migratory habits and patterns of the arriving masses (how many and for how long they stick around), I decide about an hour before my bus to Orlando will ensure that the bathroom is dead enough to allow me to wash my face without getting in anyone’s way. I forgot to change my underwear and brush my teeth earlier. There wasn’t time back in Raleigh, but I was nonetheless able to speedrun an abridged version of my morning hygiene practices in that cramped mirrorless bathroom. Of course, the Atlanta bathroom is itself in a condition as equally devastated as the waiting area, and so naturally, there is not a drop of soap of which to speak, so I offer the exasperated Mexican who is just learning this fact some face wash as a substitute, but he politely declines. An older black guy comes in as I finish washing my face, approvingly commenting how no matter where one might find himself, a man’s gotta shave. Little does he know this freshly shaven look he sees is a face unshorn for the last day and a half and what he walked in on is an even less masculine display than my sorry excuse for facial hair: the second step in a five-part skincare routine.

7/12/26

“I don’t give a fuck, I’m vaping on this bus” are ten words you never want to hear from someone once they immediately sit down in the unoccupied seat next to you (especially after just being kicked out of their last seat because it wasn’t theirs). I’d been pretty lucky otherwise, always having had two seats to myself until now. Yet, before the nic-addicted, face-tatted lesbian even opens her mouth one can immediately clock her as the embodiment of our next destination. My new companion regrets not going to Magic City and I can empathize since Louwill Lemon Pepper BBQ sounded more appetizing than the remainder of my Cheez-It Snack Mix, but I couldn’t part with twenty dollars so flippantly. Once everyone was on board, the driver heroically emphasizes that no one was to play any sound of any kind at any volume from any of their own devices, and as if we were children on a class trip, he puts on a movie—the Michael Bay-produced remake of The Hitcher—to shut us up. None of the previous buses had ceiling-mounted TV screens, which makes the inability to sleep much more inviting. But on the contrary, the West African woman behind us is already talking to someone on speaker phone. In an act of utter shameless- and fearlessness, my companion is flashing, full-brightness, a Google Translated message to get off the phone. To sweeten the deal even further, I get offered half a blanket and in-flight snacks and refreshments from my new friend.

Without even time for the credits to roll out, the DVD menu for Disturbia is already displaying on every screen. I’m promised this movie will be a good one. As expected, Rear Window for the reality TV generation turns out to be a pretty ingenious concept. At the next gas station stop, I offer to throw away her personal pan pizza box from the last gas station stop, which is enough to ingratiate myself to the woman in the window seat. “Can I tell you a racist joke?” Now, we’re talking. There’s a running joke between the friend she’s texting and her whenever she takes the Greyhound: each race she sits next to gets assigned a stereotypical designation: e.g., Tyrone would be a black guy, Pablo would be a Latino, which classifies me as a Kyle. I wish she would’ve just kept going down the entire list, as I’m eager to hear what she’d call a Chinese, but instead she asks for my name, seeing how I have proven myself valid to the Pablita with “More Good Decisions” tatted on her left cheek, plus her WhatsApp Jiminy Cricket. I find out her name is Lu and she is headed back home after celebrating her birthday with her sister. The Incredible Hulk goes on next, opening with a lone man in exile in a strange land, but once the cape shit gets rolled out I figure it’s a great time to fall asleep. I wake up in the third act.

We arrive in Orlando an hour before sunrise. I lose Lu in the swarm of the unboarded. It doesn’t feel so world-ending this time around, to walk away without saying anything, I didn’t know her and I won’t get to know anymore and really there was nothing more to say. I know I’m too sensitive about it, but I can’t help but feel there has to be something, something I can say or do that could make sense of it all. I can’t let go. I am a man forever in search of a conclusion, a turn of phrase, a shard of an image to tie everything together, but I am never clever enough to crack it. Like my northern flight almost three years ago, I just pick a spot and wait. I sit and watch a sunbeam scatter itself indiscriminately and unflinchingly through glass, across tile, and upon flesh. The 24-hour news cycle reiterates the death of Lindsey Graham, relitigating the same points about his career and character after every commerical break from some new correspondent who has nothing more insightful to add than the talking head that came before him. There’d be no point in hitting one last Citgo for some boiled peanuts or going to the bathroom to freshen up. I’ll be within four familiar walls soon enough, where I’ll be met with a shower and a seven-question questionnaire to certify my unemployment benefits. When there’s no one around, I’m in no hurry at all, certainly not in any hurry to work again.

And so, surprisingly, it’s only the last bus that runs late, everything was early or on time for the four previous drop-offs and pick-ups. I hop one-legged down each step to reclaim from under the bus the New Super Mario Bros. duffle bag that at this point deserves to be honored with the rank of sibling. Behind me is the familiar sight of my grandmother’s car waiting in a university parking lot to take me back to her house. The wide open vista of unshaded asphalt vacated for the summer exaggerates the distance between the familiar complex of dusty arts buildings and the shiny red SUV, between me and the decomposing memories that passed through there, their residue left behind—dead skin sloughed over the drain: accompanying my mother to her pottery classes as a middle-schooler, witnessing unbeknownst for the first time a woman who would occupy my mind for years, and pursuing a project that ultimately ended in a casually devastating defeat. I turn my back on them once more and get in the car. Go back South, young man, go back South and see how old you’ve both grown.