“It’s like this, and forever it will be this way, until I have worn the last hole in my last sole,” and he looked down at his own feet which were planted firmly on the dirty floor of the bus. He sat in the back because if you sat in the front or middle-in Phoenix- you would invariably be giving up your seat for a person in a wheelchair or for a young, usually hispanic, mother.
That was a constant ethical question for him. In other cities, or rather, in N.Y.C., and when he lived there, it was rare that a mother would get on with her kids and one had to be the gentleman. At least in his part of New York. But here it was guaranteed that during some part of the trip a mother would get on the bus and you would soon find yourself either standing and hot, or sitting and guilty. Rather than work this out in his head, he retreated to the back where the mothers and the wheelchairs never came.
“I am a monk with no power, and yet in a long tradition of powerful monks. My uncle was one. My great grandfather was one. Yet here I am, on the bus, worn out soul, tired and hot, alone, in the dark of the day, people distantly near, dreams unreachable but dangling in my eyes like sirens.”
Maybe it was simply women; maybe he merely needed the attentions of a woman. Perhaps he needed to know a woman could love him, which was not something that was a certitude in his mind, nor an experienced fact in his life. You never really know you matter that much until someone calls you out and chooses you.
Jannick looked out the window, and then over the ledge in front of his seat toward the bus’ midsection. The raised rear portion of the bus was safe from the weak and infirmed, and down below sat a mother and her baby. The baby looked up at him.
“Bluh bluh,” said the child, pointing up toward Jannick’s head. The mother looked up to see what the baby was looking at and caught eyes with Jannick before turning away.
“Bluh bluh,” said the baby again, looking at him.
“I don’t know,” said Jannick to the child, but nobody could hear it.
“Bluh bluh bluh, ” said the baby, frowning now.
“It’s different for you. It’s all so new for you. This world is too much now, and while we come here alone, it gets to be too much. Too much to handle alone, ” said Jannick.
“But you chose this life, just as I chose to come here and be the son of this woman who holds me. She is my mother now. And I have so much yet to live, and I’m excited, ” said the baby, sticking his fist up to his mouth.
“But, but, you don’t understand. When we looked down from there, it was easy. We had all the love in the world. Everything was clear. “
“Well, you did not have to choose to remember that place. We all had the choice to choose the lives we would be willing to live. You and I chose to remember that place there, and others chose to forget and begin life here without memories of the other. Do you now regret your choice?”
“I regret knowing that love exists, and not being able to find that love here in the life I now live. I wander like a ghost, a wind, untouched by friend or foe in this blasted dried out desert.”
“Don’t. There is love here. You will find it.”
“Which each passing day, and each year of age, I move farther away from the love I knew, and my only consolation is that with each day I also move closer to returning to that love,” said the monk on the bus to the baby.
“Don’t walk across the desert without water, friend, ” said the baby.
“I don’t really think that is my choice. And I am so alone without a drink. I have no will to live and yet, because of what I know, I cannot end my life either. At least Christ had the love of those closest to him. Satan showed his face even, and tempted him. Women washed his feet. Disciples followed him and listened to his every word and weeped when he wept. He had all of that, and yet was a God, and I am a mere man, and older than he was. I have walked a longer road with lesser vision, less wisdom at my mind’s fingertips, and no love to be seen. I am dying my little friend. Slowly. Surely. “
The mother stuck a teething ring in the baby’s mouth, and the child gave the monk a big smile before turning around to rub his head on his mother’s nose. The monk always told himself that if a baby smiled at him, he was not too far gone into the dark, but still, he wondered.
