This one time I was on a bus, a bus going from...

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This one time I was on a bus, a bus going from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Chicago, Illinois. This is a true story, too, and one of my favorites.

I had the seat open next to me for the first couple of hours and watched the bus fill up more and more at each stop. Finally, I had the last free seat, and we only had one more stop to go before the big long stretch of highway that took us through to Madison, Wisconsin – the first big city and only real major hub until we got back to Chicago.

We had one more stop and I had the only open seat and it was starting to rain. We pull up in front of the last stop, this desolate little awning in the middle of nowhere, and this big looking thing steps onto the bus, hair in its face, carrying one lone white plastic bag filled with what looked like an apple, a foil wrapped sandwich (I’m guessing), and a razor and a toothbrush. It was a dirty looking bag, too.

It brushes its hair from its eyes and it reveals itself to be a woman, not much older than me, maybe 23 at the time. She was wearing a pea-green ill-fitting shirt that fell down to almost her knees, which gave her a boxy appearance. She looked for all the world like a lost slice of toast. She waddled down the aisle with her bag in hand and finally to my precious open seat. I had by that point pretended to sleep. I looked at her with one eye open, reluctantly moving my bag from the seat with a heavy sigh. She sat down, placed her bag on her lap, and stared ahead for around twenty minutes or so.

I was writing a god-awful short story about Hollywood or something terrible like that – just a really terrible premise, I can’t remember what it was about, something about an actor drowning – the point being is that it really was fucking terrible. Like, god awful. But I was hammering away at it, typing loudly and furiously as writers do when they want to be noticed writing.

“You spelled ‘has-been’ wrong,” said a voice next to me.
“Did I?”
“Well, yeah. Sorry. I have a terrible habit of reading over people’s shoulders. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

I looked at her for the first time, mostly just to size her up, see who I was dealing with. She was big alright, but upon closer inspection she had the most amazing cheekbones, eyes, and lips. Her hair was matted and flat and greasy but you could tell that once it had been styled; she looked not unlike Farrah Fawcett if Farrah Fawcett had been raised by wolves.

We talked about books. Rather, I talked about how great I was under the guise that I was talking about literature, and she listened patiently, peppering my volley with an “Uh huh” and a “Wow” occasionally. I was 23, an asshole, and knew nothing of the world that my cock wasn’t pointed at. All I really cared about was getting famous and getting laid. My conversation cum monologue directed at this girl was pure, undiluted, sap-like ego. And she listened. And finally I wound down.

“And what about you,” I asked, “What’s your story?”

She took a deep breath. She told me about her family at first, some fucked up reverse Norman Rockwell painting involving a belt used as a weapon. I won’t get into that; it’s not my place. But she blew my mind with the second half of the story:
“I used to be a model. Nothing big, mostly local shit, but I made good enough money doing runway and some print to be able to live on my own. I was dating an older guy, and he was nice, I guess, you know? But he’d leave me alone at parties and everything. Don’t you just hate that?”

“So I was at this party, this really fucking terrible gathering, and I went outside to smoke a cigarette. I don’t mind the rain so I didn’t mind getting a little wet. It was at this fucking golf course. So anyway. I got struck by lightning.”
“You what?”
“I got struck by lightning.”
She took the apple out of her bag and took a big crisp bite of it.
“Anyway. So I’m at the hospital. And the older guy isn’t there. He just split - couldn’t deal with it. Never saw him again, really, other than to pick up some shit of mine a little later but that was fleeting. So anyway. So I’m laying there and it made me think: why am I doing this? Why am I doing this to my body, the not eating, day after day, not having fun, right? So I just stopped.”

“So I stopped doing it. And I’ve never been happier. And I’ve been staying at my aunts place out in the sticks, and now I’m going to my other aunt’s property, there’s a cabin there on her property, a mile or two down a path, y’know, and I’m going to live off the land for a while. Just to see if I can do it. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I want to see if I can survive out there. Maybe I’ll run back home after a week, a month, but I’m going to do it. Pretty much everything -” she patted the dirty little plastic white bag – “… Is in this bag here”.

We talked for the remainder of the ride as if we’d known each other for years, and finally, after I’d let my wall of ego down, I could finally fucking be myself. I gushed, overflowed with stories, real ones, too, without ego nor compromise. And she told me stories, more stories, happy ones, too, she’d lived a charmed life. And we talked, and talked, and talked the entire ride.

We pulled into Madison, and I hugged her goodbye and almost cried when we pulled away, because she was waving, standing there in the mist rain in the pea green shirt, matted hair, and the most piercing green eyes that I can still see, now, years later, years fucking later I remember that girl, wherever she went, I don’t know, and all she was was the girl in the seat next to me. On a bus. In Wisconsin, of all the fucking places in the world.

She changed me. That experience changed me. You never have any idea when this sort of thing will happen, when a former model who let herself go – with a Frida Kahlo unibrow and a dirty white plastic bag – will completely rearrange everything you thought you knew about the world – that it is, after all, just a numbers game, and all you have to do is keep watch. Those numbers are running so fast you forget the magic they can bring sometimes – you forget that everyone has a story to tell if you’ll just let them fucking tell it.

The odds of getting struck by lightning according to the National Weather Service are 1 in 1,000,000. Yet the odds of sitting next to someone like her, with a story like hers, changing your whole fucking outlook on “books” by “covers” or what have you, is a once in a lifetime occurrence.

I think about her often. I hope she found what she was looking for, out there in the woods in Wisconsin. I really do. I hope she’s well.