FADE IN:
I am on a bus full of people traveling somewhere…
Sitting sideways in the front row, I glance back occasionally. Their voices are muted, but their expressive eyes and mouths move quickly with animated conversation. At the center of all the excitement is an attractive younger woman. It’s clear she enjoys the attention. Hope seeps through her youthful pores as she converses, but she remains guarded. Good girl.
I recognize each of her fawners as people I once considered dear friends, but at some point, they took part in events that nearly destroyed me. I could never understand whether it was by choice or by ignorance that they each chose indifference and mediocrity when I needed at least one person with a moral spine to stand with me. Today, their postures scream indifference as their apathy soldiers on. We’re all here together, yet I am invisible. I find myself incapable of pretending when nothing exists.
All at once, my reflection crashes into the reality that I’m stuck on a party bus headed to an unknown destination with people I don’t want to be with. I stand up and yell, “Please! This is my stop!”
The driver pulls over to let me off while the others carry on.
I don’t know why I do the next thing — except that, clearly, I have unreconciled stuff left to flush out — but I ask my ex-husband and the father of my children to please help me gather my luggage from the cargo compartment. He willingly retrieves my bags, handing them to me with a good-luck smile. I look at him squarely and say, “Please don’t ruin her life too.” But it’s as if I’m muted. With the same pasted smile, he gets back on the bus with his new muse and our old friends.
The bus lets out a ghastly exhaust and moves down the road.
As I look around, I realize I’m miles from anything familiar, and I’ll have to navigate my way back home. This is problematic, as I have no sense of where home is.
There’s one building on the dusty highway — an old store that looks misplaced and without purpose. I walk in and find just a counter with a rusted window. As I search my bag for money, the window screeches open, and a pleasant woman with a foreign accent, possibly from India, watches me dig around.
Gratefully, I find an envelope full of bills, my money spilling out. My hands are clammy and I feel hot with anxiety.
“I need to buy a ticket to somewhere,” I say to the woman.
She shakes her head and replies, “I’m sorry, love, but we do not have tickets to ‘somewhere.’”
“Thank you,” I say and turn away. It’s clear that wherever I’m going, I’ll be walking.
As I head toward the door with my two bags, I notice an older man sitting at a small table.
It is my Dad.
He’s sort of hunched, focused on organizing some things in what looks like a small tool bag. He carefully folds the black satchel and ties a string around it. I want to run up and hug him, but I’m stopped by the warm familiarity of the scene — I once found him sitting just like this, busy at the kitchen table with this same intense concentration. He was stacking coins, getting his bus money in order for the next day. I asked him where he was going, and he looked up and said with a sort of chuckle, “I don’t know. Somewhere, I guess.”
Each day I would lose a bit more of him.
I’m both enthralled with this vision and completely undone with the fact that Dad is sitting here at a table by the door watching me try to purchase a ticket to “somewhere,” waiting patiently to make sure that wherever I’m going, I’m not going alone.
Dad looks up with a steady smile as if to say, “You ready? Let’s go, Mija.” In that moment, the fear I have stuffed down to the bottom of my gut bursts out in a single, forceful sob.
SMASH TO BLACK
As I make my morning coffee and fill the dog bowl with kibble, I let the tears fall. The fear of traveling any distance without my father cheering me on, melts away like a sunny spring frost.
That’s lovely.