By Jess Richards
I guess I’m a journalist. Really living for what I do. Well not a journalist, more of a documentary filmmaker. I film, edit, interview, cut, you name it. I don’t make them yet of course, as I don’t have a camera, but I plan to. I have all the ideas. I have the ambition and I know what is important. Like, for one, I’ll never make wildlife documentaries. Those are for failures. Those people who do not have the gift have to resort to filming animals and go into wildlife films. It’s true.
Like the documentary of those penguins, something something marching penguins. Boring as hell.
There’s far more chance of getting an interesting film as all the animals at one time or another will be doing and experiencing the exact same thing, perhaps even twice or three times, so there really is no need to single one out. You just set the camera up, and let it roll.
I’ve had loads of topics. And everyone had the information I needed. They were bursting with it, like closed flowers that had to be stroked ever so gently.
I wanted to do something on Heavy Metal Bands. Heavy Metal Bands and Christianity. They were both all over the place, and connected sometimes, in the hallway of ideological confusion. Confusicanism. NO confusion.
The bus rumbled toward me on its too small wheels. It was the same story every morning. Walk to the bus stop, perch on the cold bar, my head hanging and wait till I got picked up. I climbed in and headed to the back.
Always remember this, if you choose an empty pair of double seats in the front of the bus, there is less chance of sitting next to someone. This is true. It is an empirical fact, as people are so intent on their space and your space that they will walk right to the end of the bus searching for the potential double empty chairs, and inevitably concede to defeat, and sit down usually at the last half-full double. I had strategically chosen a seat nearer to the back, and eventually, defeated, a girl with long black hair sat down next to me, and I shifted appropriately to acknowledge her, even though my too skinny legs never encroached on her space in the first place.
I tried, out of the corner of my eye to appraise her. To try and seek out with my eyes whether she had any knowledge or opinions on Christian Heavy Metal bands. She had purple leg warmers which was definitely a sign of alternative tastes, but not very Christian. Really, leg warmers are a bit of an extravagance, a bit show-offy for the serious christian. Her hair was black, definitely a good sign of a metal follower; she wore checkered skinny jeans, another point, and a black shirt, of which I could not read the writing but was convinced it had an electric guitar and spear shaped silver words like Death or Lamb of God.
The bus had already released its breaks, those ABSair pistons, that sounded like a tremendous sigh, as if it was sighing at its fate to keep rolling its sorry wheels.
I wondered that if I continued sizing her up, it would be too late to start a conversation. Whether I would then have to wait for something to comment on, like a swerve and near collision, or a bird hitting the bus windscreen, or possibly even a weird smell in the bus.
I knew all of these things might never happen, and none offered any great fodder to launch into my question about her knowledge of metal music and Christianity. Furthermore, I worried whether she didn’t have an opinion, and then I would need a quick follow up question to make sure she did not think I was some metal weirdo trying to convert her.
I arranged my expression to be nonchalant and pensive, yet uninterested in all of the banal things happening around me. I wanted to appear all of these things on the side of my face she could see, so she would think I was self-sufficient, that really I hardly needed polite conversation with her, and she would merely be a pawn in my construction of knowledge and a one line reference in my pop-culture criticism.
I tried to cross my legs into a professional looking position1396, but I couldn’t quite get my knee past the chair in front of me, so instead placed it back in the same spot and shifted my back a bit, so that my legs were slightly more diagonal, and I could cross them. My back was now to her and I had a better view of her face in the large bus window.
There was a still lot of time left before we reached the varsity, and I thought perhaps we could just share a quiet moment staring out the window together. This would also give me a greater chance of spotting something I could comment on. Surely a man with a funny hat would walk past or someone would have a parrot on their shoulder, or perhaps even a stray dog would run into the road. At any minute now, run into death, get caught in the wheel, and we could exclaim together and fall into each other’s arms, and afterwards when we were recovering outside on the pavement, I would hold the dead dog, its mouth burst open, close to my chest and we could sit together, our arms almost touching, sharing this experience of regret and death, and I could ask in a slight state of shock what she thought about Christian metal bands, and we would laugh together at the absolute arbitrariness of humanity.
Unfortunately the window started becoming misty, and I knew soon that she would notice that I had been breathing too deeply. I wasn’t sure if she had noticed yet, and I didn’t dare move my hand to wipe off the mist in case it drew her attention to it. I held my breath and tried to shift back into the front facing position. Luckily when I glanced over at her, her head was facing the other way, and she was folding her hands in her lap. I worried that she could perhaps see my reflection in the opposite window, and see that I was examining her, seated, next to me, how every part of her seemed to be the same size as mine, so I looked forward again and surreptitiously wiped off the mist on the window, with my left arm, making slight jerky movements and coughing politely at the same time.
It really was uncanny how similar in size we were, as if our bodies came out of the same mould, hers just getting a little more battered around in her childhood.
I was almost certain that she couldn’t help me with my documentary. It was perhaps my gift to know when someone wasn’t going to be of any intellectual help to me, but I still so badly wanted to know what she was thinking. If perhaps she had just the same thoughts as I did. If she was burning to ask me questions about some documentary she was making, about the university, perhaps about the rights of bus drivers, or the horrors of childhood bullying.
I knew I could help her with these things and wanted to try and tell her this, because perhaps she didn’t have the gift of perception and would wind up in some wildlife documentary when really I could help her. We could be partners even. We were the same size and everything.
She would ask me and the first thing I would tell her, was how badly I wanted her to ask me this, and then I would suggest that she remove her purple legwarmers because really they confused people as to her interests and opinions in life, and we documentary-makers all needed to work together. To be conspicuous and open about our interests.
Then I would say that I was sorry about obstructing her view through the window, and that I had just not realised how heavily I had been breathing, how I get so into my own head sometimes, how I sometimes even miss meal-times! This would be a lie, but she would understand. She would understand, that we had made a connection and we would sit on the pavement together when we reached the varsity, no dead dog needed, talking about how lucky it was that she had asked me about this exact topic, and forget that we had come there for lectures and tutorials and seminars and other nothings.
The bus had started turning the corner and was on the last leg of its journey. We all swayed together and she leaned closer toward me, as if daring me to ask her. But I just couldn’t. Not yet. It felt as if all our thoughts had been thrown out of the bus, and became the locus of the centrifugal force around which this bus was spinning, as if nothing mattered anymore and we were all connected, held in suspension, embracing in this empty turn. Our thoughts were one at that point.
She had started packing her bag before the bus had even slowed to a stop, as if she had somewhere important to be and time was something that mattered to her, and as soon as she had safely stowed her book and her phone she left the seat and made her way to the front. I could feel the cosmic distance in between us getting heavier until it felt like it would shatter. Like it would snap in the middle and hit me square in the face. She did not yet know about our future together, and still she walked further away, without poise, not letting me see the other side of her face. I quickly pulled out some paper from my bag, and wrote the words, I make documentaries too.
And then left it on her chair.
I knew she would find it. She just had to, and when she did, I would show her how similar in size we were, and we would lie together and compare the shape of our arms and our legs and our fingers, and she would concede eventually that I was right, that her body had in fact been a little more battered in life.
