The 55 to Oxford Circus

The door slams behind her, rattling the glass and disturbing the peace of the morning around her. She inhales that typical London air: damp, cool, bracing. Before she can move, she has to put her headphones in and hit shuffle on the playlist she made especially for this occasion. The music starts, and so does she.

She ticks the familiar things off in a list in her head: blue-grey sky, fog, crunching leaves and the squeak of her rubber-soled boots beneath her. She looks both ways, still unsure of where the traffic comes from, even after all this time. She still jogs across the street to the bus stop, doubting her own mind and anticipating a car speeding towards her. It is a small, quiet magic, when the bus rounds the corner seconds after her arrival, as if she had summoned it. There’s the usual shuffle for both her mask and her Oyster card, the whoosh of the bus stopping in front of her still catching her off guard, even when she watched it approach and flagged it down. She likes the small beep announcing her entrance after she presses the card to the pad and exhales as she finds an empty seat against the window.

The bus starts with a jolt, and London begins to pass by in a blur. She has a million things on her mind; so many things she doesn’t remember and a few dozen she does, in stark, vivid clarity. She always takes this time by herself to think, reflect, and maybe even wallow a bit. Memories pass like the city outside – snapshots of a life she’s worried she’s not living. The music continues to play in her ears, familiar and reassuring.

She thinks of things like how her sweater is itchy, and she might not be wearing the right jacket, and also the weird postmodern world she lives in and how she doesn’t really know what “postmodern” even means, just that it’s not good. She thinks about how tired she is and worries she forgot to do her homework for this class, even though she checked and there was no assignment, because this is what she does. She thinks and she doubts all day long until she sleeps, and then she wakes up and does it again.

Someone sits down next to her and she shifts. She’s only occupying the one seat, but is she taking up too much room? She showered just this morning, her hair still damp, but does she smell weird? Is she sweating? Is her music too loud? She turns her head away from the stranger, but the questions run along the bottom of her brain like a news chyron. She learned that’s what they’re called recently, and she likes this mental image.

Her stomach rumbles and turns, hunger becoming nausea becoming hunger becoming nausea again. She wonders when she ate last – a small meal last night. Pasta and sauce. Nothing very stimulating. She didn’t eat much yesterday, or the day before, or the week before that. She forgets, sometimes. Mostly by accident, maybe a little bit on purpose, she’s not sure. She wonders if everyone forgets to eat or if that’s just her. She vows to make herself something after class, but she’ll forget that, too. Accidentally or on purpose.

She’s sort of rambling, rolling from thought to thought. Is it rambling if it’s not spoken? Can she ramble if it’s just in her head? It’s probably still rambling if it’s written, words splattered across a page, running into each other like water, like blood. She lets herself ramble in her head, where she bothers nobody but herself.

The next song comes on like a blow to the kidneys, her breath expelling from her lips with a quiet hush as the world around her slows. Ouch. She put this song on the playlist, but it shocks her with how much it hurts every time. She thinks of the videos of the artist online, smiling and strumming on stage. How could she sing this song and smile? I’m listening and I’m not smiling. I’m not smiling at all.

She thinks of people half a world away. Across an ocean. She remembers, the edges fuzzy but the center of it bright with pain. This memory, too, is magic. Dark, black magic. A curse. Over a year ago now, a frigid February morning. Bundled up, brisk walk around campus, terse words. Pounding in her ears, a secret she knew but was still devastated to hear admitted aloud. Betrayal, tears, an ending. The words that died in her throat, stuck and still unsaid, all these months later.

These words are poison, made by a witch standing over a cauldron. The witch poured them down her throat and now they’re trapped. She will probably never say them.

Above all, she remembers the humiliation, the desperation. She always remembers the humiliation the most.

The song changes and she lets go of the memory. So many things she remembers, even more she does not. So many things she knows, even more she doesn’t – like how her phone works or how people make themselves invulnerable. How her brain skips around like a stone over water, never quite landing until it sinks.

She thinks it might just be anxiety. She thinks it might be depression. She tries not to think about how this is where she lives but it’s not technically her home, how she doesn’t really know what home is supposed to be. Living here but not belonging, an outsider inside. She tries not to think about how her family lives in another country. She tries not to think about her twenty-first birthday, which already passed without that special birthday feeling. She tries not to think about how or when that feeling faded; the same one that used to make Christmas magical.

London hasn’t lost its magic, at least not like New York has. Maybe it’s because nobody here has hurt her yet – because she doesn’t know anyone here to hurt her. Maybe magic is painless. Maybe magic is finding things beautiful even with the pain.

She knows the feeling she gets when she walks along the South Bank, across the Millennium Bridge towards St. Paul’s, is magic. That kind of magic feels like freedom; like a strange, happy kind of tightness in her chest; like the sense of belonging she’s been chasing her whole life. When she goes there later, with the same music playing, it won’t feel like holding on. It will feel like letting go.

Maybe magic is just the art of letting go.

For now, she has three more stops until her destination, three more stops of holding on to the music and the memories and the thoughts she can never escape. She thinks and thinks and thinks, an endless loop to the tune of her carefully curated and very specifically hurtful playlist of songs.

A playlist for masochists. Music to overthink to. Music to remember to. Music to forget to.

Inside the bus: turmoil. Outside: the simple magic of London in the fall.