My Bus is Haunted

I'm surrounded by the past

Sometimes I cry on the bus. Not loud, dramatic, is-that-woman-okay-or-should-we-call-someone crying, just the odd tear that escapes when I’m very drunk, or very tired, as I look out the window at the ghosts of my past lives. I still live at home, in the house I’ve always lived in. And I’ve done the same bus journey pretty much every day for the past twelve years. It feels like everything I’ve ever done, and everyone I’ve ever been, can be found somewhere on that route.

I’m only especially nostalgic at night time, but that’s also the time I’m most often on the bus. And it wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for two major contributors, 1- I listen to the most depressing playlists no matter my mood, and, 2- I get carsick if I look at my phone for too long, so I spend the majority of the journey staring out the window. This is a dangerous combo that leads to me yearning for periods of my life that I know for a fact I didn’t even enjoy while they were happening.

A few minutes from my house is a wall that I knocked down the first time I ever drove a car. Well technically it was my second time driving but my first time turning. I went too wide with the turn, then dramatically overcorrected and ended up on the pavement, and straight into a wall. In my defence, it had to have been a very badly built wall because I’d be surprised if I was even going 10km an hour. But even so, the week before my leaving cert I knocked over the wall outside an engineering firm (owned by some very nice people who let us rebuild it ourselves, and by us I mean my dad and our neighbour.) I pass this (rebuilt) wall every day, and most of the time I don’t even notice it, it’s just a wall. But every now and then, I’m flooded with the memory of that day.

And this happens for the entirety of my bus journey, I seem to have a core memory at almost every stop. The McDonalds, which I’m boycotting but can’t pretend not to miss, that got egged when I was there on a late night McFlurry run at seventeen. The housing estate I had to get off at once at thirteen because I realised I was on the wrong bus, terrified my friends wouldn’t be on the next one. The church hall where I used to do dancing, hours spent in the rain while we waited for the teacher to arrive and unlock it.

I pass my secondary school. Endless snippets of memories made at that bus stop after school. Sneaking looks at certain boys, spying on whoever the latest gossip involved, debriefing the day with friends. There, I talked to best friends, and near strangers, I cried over exam results and laughed over inside jokes. They’re building a new school to replace the old one, I watch it progress each day. Soon they’ll knock down the building that housed my most formative years. The lockers that used to hold my books, the toilets where I used to hide during class, the classrooms that have my name scribbled on the ceiling. New students will make memories in this new school. I wonder will they have these same thoughts when they pass by it years later.

I pass by the house of a girl I don’t speak to anymore that I sometimes miss. And the house of a girl I don’t speak to anymore that I don’t miss at all. Sometimes we drive by I barely even notice, and sometimes I’m hit by a wall of memories of time spent in each of those houses. I pass by the houses of multiple primary school friends. People I saw every day for fourteen years and now I have no idea where life has taken them. I think about these people and how much they once meant to me. Sometimes I see people on the bus and I pretend not to, hoping to avoid an awkward convo. And yet when I’m in this mood and they cross my mind you’d swear we were soulmates.

I think this is an element of living at home that people don’t talk about enough. How do you move on from the past when you’re literally surrounded by it? Memories confront me daily that other people only have to deal with at Christmas. And a lot of these memories weren’t even significant. It’s not like I’m passing the site of life changing events on the daily. But I suppose I’ve always done a lot of thinking on busses, and it’s sometimes sad to realise how much these thoughts change as time goes by. The people, and the drama, and the dreams that used to occupy my mind don’t matter so much anymore, they’ve been replaced with new ones. And I think about how sad that would’ve made the me of the past, which makes me sad now.

I know nostalgia is a weakness of mine. I need to stop romanticising the past, especially times I know were unhappy. I’m working on it. But sometimes when I’m on the bus and it’s dark, and Taylor Swift's The Prophecy is blasting in my headphones, I miss people I don’t like, I yearn for places I didn’t want to be, and I ache for the person I no longer am.

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