On Our Bus

I like our bus! The road is not too bumpy, the driver is a funny man (when he talks on the intercom), and we take turns standing and sitting. There are a lot of people, so it’s tricky trying to be fair, but we all get along rather well.

There used to be fewer people on the bus, I hear. People would get on and get off, going to places not on the bus. But then something happened, not sure what, and people no longer wanted to get off the bus. So there were more and more people with each stop. There are very many of us now. Millions. Billions. Maybe trillions.

I like to get a seat on the left side, so I can look at the other lane and wonder. But I also like the right side where I can focus on the people outside and their houses. They look kind of funny, but also a little sad.

When I am standing in the aisle and happen to be close to the front, I look at the road ahead. It gets narrower and narrower until it stabs into the horizon and disappears. It’s funny. And there is a great big mountain over the horizon, you can see it on a clear day, but only as a blue shadow. The road goes right into the middle of the mountain, but the mountain so far away that it never gets any bigger. I don’t know if we can get there in a million years.

Numbers are a funny thing, because they help you imagine things which are hard to understand. Like the number of people on the bus, the distance to the mountain, and the number of bus stops on the way. We can do calculations with numbers, and sometimes we do, mostly in the evenings. Then later in the night, when I go to sleep, I dream about numbers. I wake up at each stop, so my dreams are broken into tiny little pieces, and some numbers are too big to fit into a single dream.

The number of buses is one. I think.

Posted by: Paweł Kowaluk