A young man is screaming in my general direction as I walk down eighty second avenue. It is one thirty in the afternoon. I am heading to work. It is Friday. He says at the beginning of time no one needed a name, which I find to be somewhat interesting. He is wearing a torn flannel, torn jeans and three hats, each torn but the last. I am running late, and despite that fact I feel the urge to ask him about himself/how his day is going, but then I see that his tent is overflowing with torn cardboard, empty cans of beer, and a mess of other items indistinguishable from one another, so I change my mind. I avoid him. It occurs to me that I do not fear this man; however, I do fear the unbearable possibility that if I don’t get to work on time, today, or the next time I run late, no matter the cause, it could be only a few short weeks or months until I become him.

The truth is that I have been one paycheck away from sleeping outside since the day I was born. My mother and father were too. I often ask myself what have we done so wrong to find ourselves in this empty place, where so near the passing of money from one greedy mouth to the next is the ruling order, yet here in this empty whole of our lives, the ruling order is instead: survive.

We live inside the harmony of greed. We are born into a melody of starvation.

I stand at the bus stop, and check the arrival app—14 minutes. That means I’ll be 17 minutes late if it arrives when it claims it will. Sometimes the app is wrong, and a bus pulls up right as I get comfortable leaning against the blue insignia. Today however allows only the rumbling of drivers as they speed down the road,and the ticking sound of another car turning rightward against its will. The soundtrack of a city is the soundtrack of vehicles in motion. Stopping and starting, either at red lights or in parking lots. I myself don’t own a car, nor do I want one. The bus is fine for me. Much safer. Plus, I like to watch people, and I like to fall asleep in motion. I like to listen to what other bus riders say and compose poetry from our informal commiserating. They’re conversations are like a lullaby. I feel the most rested after a nap on the public bus. 11 minutes.

I consider the option of texting my boss and informing her that I will be late. She most likely expects it, since it’s an unpleasant habit of mine. It isn’t that I sat there and actively chose to be tardy today, nor do I choose to be late at every other instance of social gathering that comes my way, but rather that I turn everything off, when I am home, when I am free from the wretching of punching in, until I punch out again.

This is the only way I can stay sane. This meager hope that the apartment I live in will still be there, disappears when I am buried inside it. The way calmness washes over me when I breach its walls is something the boss will never understand. The boss is content to chirp orders from her air conditioned office, or set up auto-bill-pay through an app on her phone. The boss has no children. The boss got married in college and wants to have her 401k paid off before her husband plants his seed and they raise a child, old already, but content to pass the wealth down to a new body, like an extension of themselves rather than a new person. I think sometimes that rich babies aren’t their own people; they are merely host bodies for a system that keeps them rich.

I take a deep breath as the time remaining turns from 9 to 8 minutes. Always just after these moments of anger I feel sadness mixed up with horror swooping down like a wind rush. I go from clenching my fists to simply staring blankly, like a small bird on a branch. Time moves even more slowly, and now the notion of letting the boss know that I’ll be late, seems like a bad – not an impossible idea. Why would she care anyways. I am, like all other things to her, replaceable.

I am less than even that. I am already replaced.

My mother once told me that she feels sad all of the time. She told me this from her bedroom,after a bottle of cheap beer spilled and she asked me to clean it up. I was a young teenager at the time, so I begrudgingly soaked up the pool of liquid and asked her why the fuck she couldn’t do it herself. She said, I feel sad all of the time, and I realized that this wasn’t the kind of sad that you feel when a pet dies, or a friend moves away. No, this kind of sad was all consuming; she was on fire with sadness.

Somebody else walks up to the bus stop, an older Black woman with a cane. She sits down and nods her head to me. I nod back, and say good afternoon mam,and she replies by smiling and then looking away patiently. 4 minutes.

Across the street, there is an abandoned animal hospital. Before its gates two young boys laugh at a video on a phone. They laugh with abandon. They laugh while walking up a small hill. I keep trying to look away, but I am curious to see if it’s possible to make out what they are laughing at. They keep getting farther and farther away, until even their laughter is inaudible.

Once I asked my father why my mother cried all the time, yet he never seemed to. He said sometimes you take in so much of another person’s sadness that you reach your limit,and you lose all feelings, sad or otherwise. He was gathering tools to fix a neighbors lawn mower. He could fix almost anything, except our money situation. He stood to leave, and patted me on the shoulder. He looked like he wanted to say more, but then he left.

The white heat of anxiety is circling me like a hungry bird, or a satellite. It becomes the most intense when I realize it’s there, butas it circles backwards and behind me, I nearly forget what it is causing me all this pain. It becomes a buzzing; like the low frequency humming of a dying radio. I glance at the time left, and it says that the bus is due to arrive now. This is when I allow myself to be distracted enough to peer up the hill to my left, and begin assessing each passing car. Not the bus. Not the bus. Still not the bus.

My boss told me last time that if I was going to be late it was no big deal, just so long as I let her know as soon as I knew. So why haven’t I told her? Why am I just sitting here staring at each passing car, hoping that my fear would transform it into a city bus with an old and polite driver.

I do not know.

Eventually the bus does arrive,and I hold my card up to the scanner. It dings with approval. A familiar sound that means the old phase of waiting in stillness, has been replaced by a new phase of waiting in motion.

I find a seat near the back, where my neck rests the most comfortably. I set my backpack on the floor, and loop the strap around my leg. I lay my head back and in some distant way, I allow this moment to be a free moment. I’m on my way. I’m going as fast as I can. I am doing the best I can for myself, and I fall asleep.

– Yaakov Fox

Author’s Note: This is my first story to be published.