I’m sitting here at 2 in the morning and I can’t stop thinking about that bus ride last Tuesday, which I shouldn’t have even been on because my truck is in the shop again—it’s a 1994 Ford and Bill over at the garage says it needs a new transmission but where am I going to get that kind of money on a fixed income? Anyway, I had to take the regional transit down to the clinic in the city, which is a two-hour haul if the traffic is good, and I haven’t been out of our little valley in years because everyone knows everyone here and the city is just... it’s too much noise. Does anyone else get that feeling where the air feels too thick to breathe when there are too many people around? Am I the only one who feels like they’re drowning in a room full of oxygen? I remember when Arthur—that was my husband, we were married for fifty-two years before the cancer took him—he used to say I was like a turtle, I’d just pull my head in and wait for the storm to pass. He called it my "shutting down." I think in those clinical terms sometimes, maybe it's a form of catatonic withdrawal or just a plain old collapse of the nervous system. Is that weird? To just stop moving when things get loud? I used to do it when he’d get frustrated with the farm equipment, just stand by the kitchen sink and let the water run over my hands, not feeling a thing. It’s like my proprioception just fails and I don't know where my body ends and the air begins. So there I was on this bus, and it was CROWDED, I mean standing room only, and this younger man—maybe forty, wearing one of those expensive-looking suits that doesn’t fit right around the middle—he was standing right over me. He kept bumping into my shoulder every time the driver hit the brakes, and the driver was being very aggressive with the gear shifts, you could feel the whole chassis shuddering. And this man, he was just... shouting. Not at me, but to the whole world, complaining about how slow we were going and how the city was a joke and how he was going to be late for some meeting. He kept hitting my arm with his briefcase. Hard. Every time the bus lurched, BANG, right into my rotator cuff. And I just stayed still. I didn't move an inch. I didn't even blink. I could feel the bruise forming, I just knew it, a little blooming violet under the skin of my upper arm, but I didn't say a word. I felt this strange, heavy sort of melancholia—is that the right word?—watching him be so angry about five minutes of his life. I was looking out the window at the gray slush on the side of the road and I felt like I was already gone. Like I was a ghost just haunting a seat on the 402 line. Does everyone feel like they're disappearing as they get older? Like you're becoming transparent and people just think they can walk right through you? I kept thinking about the time Arthur and I went to the state fair in 1974, which has nothing to do with the bus, I know, but I remember the crowd there was so loud too and I did the same thing then, just stopped in the middle of the midway while people swirled around me like a river around a stone. It’s a habit, I guess. A maladaptive coping mechanism, if you want to be precise about it. I wondered if the man on the bus even saw me as a person. I’m seventy-six years old and I’ve spent so much time being the stone. Am I the only one who finds a weird kind of comfort in being pushed around and not saying a word? Is it a pride thing? Or is it just that I don't have the energy to exist out loud anymore? He said, "Can you believe this? This is UNACCEPTABLE," right into my ear, and his breath smelled like stale coffee and those little peppermint discs. I could have moved my legs to give him more room, or I could have said "Excuse me, sir, you're hurting me," but I just sat there. I felt this deep, aching longing for... I don't even know. For someone to notice I was being still on purpose? No, that's selfish. I just felt sad that he was so loud and I was so quiet and neither of us was really there. It felt like a dissociative episode, looking at my own hands in my lap and wondering whose they were. They look so much like my mother’s hands now, all liver spots and thin skin like parchment. I sometimes worry that I’ve stayed silent for too long in my life. In a small town like Oakhaven, you learn early on that if you don't say anything, nobody can use it against you. There are secrets in this valley that have stayed buried for eighty years because people like me just... don't react. We just sit on the bus and let people bump into us. It’s a kind of affective blunting, I suppose. But is it a secret if you just feel empty? I felt a phantom limb sensation where Arthur’s hand used to rest on my knee. If he’d been there, he would have told that man to watch himself. He was always my shield. But he's gone, and the shield is gone, and I'm just the target. By the time I got to my stop, my shoulder was actually throbbing, a dull nociceptive signal that I just ignored. I got off the bus and didn't look back. I walked to the doctor’s office and sat in another waiting room, and I realized I hadn't spoken a word out loud in three days. Not since I told the mailman thank you on Saturday. Does that happen to other people? Where you realize you've just become a part of the furniture of the world? I’m sitting here in the dark now, the house is so quiet you can hear the floorboards contracting in the cold, and I’m just wondering... if I had screamed on that bus, would it have made a sound? Or am I just waiting for the world to finish bumping into me so I can finally go to sleep? Anyone else feel like they're just a statue waiting for the park to close?