Thoughts on the bus

across the city and back in time. (this is a photo essay - all photos by me!)

Bus bart station bart bart bart bart on film

I’m sitting on the bus, in the very back, where everyone who strove to be cool either sat or wanted to sit but never mustered up the courage. The first image in the gallery is an actual photo from the the seat where I wrote that^.

Ocean Beach from the bus, shot on Kodak Portra 400

I’m sitting here with my notebook and the window’s cracked open, a warm breeze coming in and messing up all our hair in a good way. Sunny days in San Francisco make me want to melt away someplace nice, and you could almost hear a lullaby to that tune on the 48 from the Mission to Ocean Beach. Ambient chatter and the occasional tank-top floats in and out to the beat of the stops that afternoon. 

That I could walk down my block, hop into a silver rectangle with red stripes, and be transported all the way across town at virtually no cost continues to blow me away. It makes me feel like a cell traveling through the veins of a living, breathing organism where we (the people) are its lifeblood. 

the one sitting across the aisle

I see a woman in the seat in front of me and another woman across the aisle from me in the back row, and they’re both looking out the window lost in thought. They look like they might be older than me, and I wonder if they’re experiencing this ride the same way I am–thinking about how nostalgic it feels to be sitting at the back of this half-empty bus on a Friday afternoon, knowing we’ll never get to sit on a bus the way we did in grade school when our baseline was an effortless acceptance that there’s so much out of our control==and finding peace in that because we have our whole lives ahead of us and who knows how our future’s gonna pan out. All the while we’re missing the irony that that thought doesn’t even occur to us explicitly because right now all we care about is being cool enough to sit at the back of the bus. 

the one sitting in front

I’m looking ahead, vaguely at the woman in front of me, waiting for her face to catch the light so I can capture this moment on film. I’m watching the road ahead through the side windows, noticing where the light breaks through the trees and houses to reach the road unimpeded, waiting for the moment when they might extend out far enough to line up with the window and beam in at the perfect time to reach her side profile unimpeded. I’m trying to line up this picture, my hands shaking from the bumps in the road, and I’m thinking maybe the light will never hit her face at the right angle when I click the button at the right time. I feel like I’m always waiting for the light to hit my face at the right time so I can be seen in full glory, finally, but that window might be so short that I wonder if I’ll even be able to take it in when the time comes, let alone capture it for later. 

I’m waiting for the light to hit my face at the right angle, at the right time, all these streaks beaming in and out, waiting my turn for something extraordinary to happen but the truth is it might never line up at all and I might never get this picture. At least I’ll have this memory and all the ones before it where I know what I felt was real, even if I have nothing to show for it except for these blurry images replaying in my head and these words I can only try my best to jot down on the back of this bumpy bus. 

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This photo essay has a physical counterpart - one of the photos in here is showing at The Web photography show at WazmoKai, SF until 5/24/24. It’s part of an art pop up with lots of cool art - come check it out!