the back of the bus

Looking at you, sitting in the back of the bus with your Mexican nanny and off-white pants, reminded me of a time of my own childhood. 

You are probably 9, with sky blue eyes and a short blond crop. You have a small triangulated nose, a chiseled cheek and a short, stubbed chin. Your face is partially square, a little rounded at the jaws and arched around the forehead. You look like a Cole, or may be a Colin -I cannot quite tell. And in the 20 minutes of our bus ride, with very different purposes and eventual destinations, you never smiled. At all. You looked out of the window, and looked at the green of Central Park giggle at the top of your curled eye lashes. You looked at the stones of the narrow passageways, hugging against moss and pearls of rain. You looked at people, and shoes and a salad of paper scraps strewn on the bus floor. But your lips didn't sink an inch. Your eyes rarely blinked. And your face looked frozen in a pocket of the hour. It was 4 pm on a Wednesday, buried in the midst of a bustling afternoon. You were going home. With a non-mother mother. Azalea print backpack. And a non-ironed tie. 

You are a beautiful child. Whoever you are. And innocent, and reminiscent of a past self that I beckon only with memories. Memories of a conundrum, memories of a hallucinogen, memories of acoustic dreams, resonating like laser beams along the edges of my body. You are lost now, in the ocean of faces, in the bowl of clouds of Manhattan boys, in the lungs and vapor balls of the Upper West Side. You are a memory, a negative on my camera film, bottled with sulfides and lathered with peels of Washington cherries -your cheeks are ablaze, your hair in a lilt, your consciousness sparked in the origami of purpose. 

I am the face of aging time. I am the clock of pencil chandeliers. I am the surface of pregnant clocks. And I think about your face with a sparrow in my heart, with a volcano of tears from calcific depression, from the yowls of anguish disguised as smiles -everyday, every night, paddling in the sea of the backwater ripples. Obsession with boys that never came, that pushed away at the gentlest touch, that kissed and drank bottles of wine, and ran away to the tip of the estuary saying call me when you reach home. And then there was silence. The disguised ignoring, the painted facade of the germinating actor, standing as if in a Venetian court and hailing at the ruins of a diseased soul. The double life, the double pronged wretchedness of your poisonous self -throw away your face of pretended truths, slice away your veins and shed your layers and layers of invisible make-up. When you walk on that ward and take care of people, of dying psychiatrics and breast-missing hoodlums, you say that you believe. What do you have, to be able to believe? What do you say, feeding them injury, that they are about to lose this life? Because, nursing was your only other option, DB. Switching from real estate, to a meaningful path, you didn't lose your decorative lies.

You beautiful child. Asleep in my mind. You reminded me of a time when all I worried about was good food, shelter and statues of Lego. And sat at the back of a bus, yellow and blue, and smiled at the stars, asleep in the sky, ringing and turning to melodies of love. Thinking to myself -I love people, they must all be good.