at 1:14AM
rick still loves u barbara & he’s scared of the future
I headed out around 8. I usually go to Acme, but I hadn’t left the house yet, so I felt up for a longer bus ride and like going to a Wegmans I hadn’t been to before. I took bus 42 at Spruce & 40th and got off at Chestnut & 13th to then take bus 406 at Market & 13th to Rt-70 & Sayer Ave. In retrospect, I should’ve headed into KOP. I hadn’t looked long before selecting the closest looking Wegmans, and I should’ve headed toward the area I was familiar with rather than into Jersey. I was running on empty and wasn’t thinking very critically. And this story is a good example of how most of the chaos I've experienced in my life is self-inflicted. About halfway through the ride on bus 406, a man got on and started making his way down the aisle. I knew right as we made eye contact that he was coming all the way down to talk to me. He sat in the row across from me and immediately struck up a conversation. He was wearing a pilled blue v-neck, a red, white, and blue ribbon around his neck like the ones you usually see with a medal, and light maroon pants with a thin black polka dotted knee brace overtop. He was an older man with medium length thin grey/brown hair, a widow's peak hairline, a blue surgical mask, and a short beard. He didn’t introduce himself as Rick, but this was the name he addressed himself as in a few of the fragmented stories he told. Another man boarded before him as well as a college-aged woman, but they had both taken seats in some rows ahead of me. I originally boarded with a couple who were out of breath after chasing down the bus and thanked the driver for saving their lives (“you saved our life!”). The seats were high and I'm sure other people boarded while I was distracted by intently listening to Rick. The first thing he asked me was if I was in school. I told him I dropped out. He was curious about my age and told me that I looked just like a girl he used to know. When talking about her he only used past tense. Her name was Barbara, and he repeated to himself a few times that he should’ve married her. It sounded like she asked him to marry her (“Rick, marry me”), and that he even agreed to her keeping her last name. He said she was smart and went to school—and as for why they lost touch, I’m not sure. In one of the later interactions he had with her, she sent him a nude photo of herself wrapped in an american flag. He crossed his arms over his chest while he described it. The bus picked up speed and I started to audibly lose Rick’s story. As the bus volume lowered coming to a stop, he matched it with the volume of his voice by being quiet and glancing toward the front of the bus. I was able to gather that the nude photo was connected to one of Barbara’s exes somehow, and he sounded preoccupied by the fact that for her to be posed like she was, someone had to have taken the photo (“you let someone else see you naked?”). He shifted around in his seat, and his eyes were focused elsewhere. There were no more than two seconds of silence before he’d start to speak again, and that's about how much time he allocated for me to answer a few of his questions. I think he needed me to be someone who’d listen to whatever he could fit into the fleeting time our paths crossed. He pulled out what looked like a dead Wii U GamePad, and he fidgeted with it while telling me his friend got it for him. He spoke just loud enough for me to pick out a few lines, and he raised his voice at the tail end of his questions.
◦ He asked me if I knew that we’re all connected (“you're here for a reason, you know that?”)
◦ He mentioned a story about people dropping dead in Dakota (he didn't specify North/South), and said more deaths are coming. And he said they’re gonna say it's from the coronavirus vaccine, but really it's God removing the wicked from the world. He mentioned Donald Trump and shared his beliefs that evil forces control the actions of the wicked.
◦ He said that only 2% of the population is religious, and how this disrespects God, whose son died on the cross. He then asked me if I believe in God, and after hearing my response, he noted that my parents must have told me about him from a young age then. I don’t know what I believe in, and I’ve only been to church a handful of times, but I told him I do.
◦ At one point he brought up North Korea and battled back and forth with himself for a while (“no, no, they’re not gonna”). He painted a picture of the future for me and said one day the radiation could be so bad I couldn't go outside. He told me it’s already in the air. Throughout his catastrophizing speech, he assured me that I was young. He told me he was scared of the future, and he asked me if I was scared of it. When I told him I wasn't, he sounded surprised (“you aren’t?”).
◦Rick’s monologue was riddled with heartache and short recollections of Barbara. I was trying to follow his story and display my attentiveness while also briefly glancing at the gps to make sure I didn’t miss my stop. I tried to find a break between his words to let him know my stop was coming up. He reached out to fist bump me and wished me well as I walked toward the front of the bus.
The dropoff spot by the Wegmans wasn't ideal because I had to cross (something like) eight lanes of traffic to enter the shopping center, but there was enough time to cross during the light changes on either side further down the road. I ended up taking an Uber home, which I have been trying to avoid, but it made the most sense because there were no direct routes back home. During the ride, I looked up “rick and barbara” and dicked around in the search results. Part of me is always looking for some deeper meaning to everything. And that part of me loves looking up the meanings and superstitions attached to little details that stand out to me some days.
9:31am
acacia speaks ༄ 