The man at the bus stop

It was a perfect day in Texas, on and off sunshine with temperatures just below unbearably hot. I travelled for days just to get to Austin and experience its special “weirdness.” I had spent all morning and noon enthusiastically treasure hunting all the used bookstores and vintage shops. As I made my decision to call it a day, I was finally satisfied and the exhaustion of the last three days finally set in. The patient Texan hospitality I had been receiving only added to my languidness. I felt a delicious lack of motivation to do anything at all.

I was waiting for the bus that afternoon when I was started by a voice yelling and swearing violently behind me. It seemed that a schizophrenic man was making his way to the very same bench I was waiting on. He was swearing and fighting with an imaginary opponent. Since he didn’t show any signs of noticing me or physical violence, I had no motivation to move at all. The relaxation I felt in my body was greater than its discomfort.

As we sat there he continued to swear startlingly and would make me jump, but I tried my very best not to react at all. I didn’t want to feed into the experience of the illness. I would much rather stay in the delight of the excellent day I was having. A young man waiting at the bus stop next to me might have felt differently, for whatever reason he decided to cross the street. The schizophrenic yelled after him ‘don’t get run over!’ The young man made a quick nervous glance and walked away without looking back again.

I waited in silence without moving at all, except to turn my neck sometimes to see if the bus was coming. He slowly started to calm down and got quieter and less angry. Finally by the time the bus came, he turned to me for the first time and said, “you should go in first.”

And I responded, “thank you”

Later in the evening I found myself calming down. Down from the confusion of grief and the shame of being a woman I had been carrying since it was taken from me more than a decade ago.

What a complicated world, I thought. It is something valuable to know what is real and to think reasonable things in a world like this. The shame that I had built my dignity upon was not real. What was real was all the things I wanted to believe in.