A Little Bit Closer
The clock in the car was blinking 4:00. The Greyhound was half an hour early for the first time in history and Kristin wasn’t ready to say good bye yet. Three days hadn’t been enough time. She had some sort of romanticism built up in her head that this trip would put the last five years of her relationship with Jake into perspective but it hadn’t. Still too young to have such a long distance relationship but old enough to know that it was something good; she was leaving disappointed again. James’ ice blue eyes, his wit, his charm, were all characteristics that she searched for in boys after she came home from trips like this one. She never found them. There was always something missing. She still didn’t know what that something was exactly, but it was impossible for her to find outside of Kennesaw, Georgia. Now, with her second departure this year from this station quickly approaching, Kristin realized she only had twenty-three hours before she was home again. A grand total of seventy-two hours on the Greyhound for only six days worth of time with James this year. Kristin felt like she spent more time on the bus than with James. She was desperate to make the last few minutes with him go slower.
“Go wherever you want to go, Kristin. If you’re not happy, why not go somewhere else? Just remember just being somewhere won’t make you happy.” She thought about how impossible that was while James started rattling off places she could go. She hoped he would say “Georgia”, he didn’t. As he was talking, she heard a bus screech to a halt on the other side of the station. The simple sound of the bus hissing to a stop made her heart sink into her stomach. She knew that sound meant she would soon be going home. “Kristin, are you listening to me?”
“I think that’s my bus” she replied trying hard not to her voice shake. She opened the door and stepped outside.
They took her bags into the station. She wanted to say so much to James on the two and a half hour ride back to the Greenville station but the timing never seemed right. The silence was too comfortable and she was too scared to ruin whatever it was that they had. She had only a few more minutes to tell him how she felt, but there was only more silence. He leaned over and gently kissed her head. With a sudden rush of confidence she finally opened her mouth to speak only to be interrupted by the crackling of the station’s loudspeaker. “The four-thirty Greyhound to Charlotte will begin boarding at this time.” “I guess that’s you, sweet cheeks.” James whispered and smiled and he squeezed her hand.
She knew he was trying to make the best of the situation, but unlike him she had never been good with good byes. The tears started welling in her eyes again. “Damn it Kristin,” she thought. “Just five more minutes, just don’t cry for five more minutes.” She regained her composure. Knowing it would be at least a few months, maybe longer, until she saw him again, she gave him one more kiss. She picked up her bags and headed for the bus. She didn’t know how long he watched her walk away, she couldn’t turn back around. So many times she had told herself over the last few years to forget about him. She told herself that she should just find another boy, a closer boy, but five years later, her feelings still hadn’t changed and that’s why she kept coming back.
Blinded by tears, she struggled to get her bag in the overhead compartment. The minute she sat down in her seat she broke down. What she had said earlier kept replaying in her head, “I just wish I knew where I was going.” She wanted to figure out things with James, but that wasn’t all. The last two years of her life had been spent taking pointless general education classes and trying to make it on her own for the first time. Kristin knew she made the right decision when she decided against applying to colleges in Georgia just to be with James. Knowing it was the right decision didn’t make it any easier though, especially now. She wished that she was just a little bit closer.
The email he had written her right after her first trip to Georgia a few months before came to mind. “Kristin, you can’t push life in the direction you want it to go, it will take you where you’re supposed to be, and don’t worry, every day we get a little bit closer to where we are going.” But she couldn’t help pushing time forward. All she seemed to be able to focus on anymore what how long it would take for the next two years to be over so that she could start a real life. All of her life she had done this. She always had to be one step ahead of the game, and she always tried to have her future firmly in place before she got there.
But she never felt like she was getting any closer. She felt as if this trip only brought more unanswered questions to add to the mountain of them. As the bus pulled away from the station her mind took her back to her first trip to Georgia that year. She thought about the anticipation of the last twenty minutes on the bus, the driver making fun of her Penn State sweatshirt, and that feeling she felt when she was finally with James. When she saw him waiting outside the station, anxiously awaiting her arrival, leaning against his beat up Camry (distinguishable by the countless band decals displayed with thoughtful precision on the bumper) she knew it was moments like this that had made the last five years worth it. It was these moments that would keep bringing her back.
For the first time since she had left for college, if only for three days, she felt like she was home on that first trip to Georgia. Everything was so different there. Life was slower, people were friendlier, and the sky had never looked so blue. She recalled James’ best friend asking her, in Southern drawl, “So whaddya’ll eat up there?” As if she was planets instead of hours away. She adored his friends and if she was honest with herself, she loved him. She left that first time, now nearly half a year ago, feeling whole. She hated that the only boy that made her feel whole was so far away.
As the hours passed she closed her eyes, but couldn’t sleep. She shifted restlessly in the silent bus. The quiet was overwhelming— just her and the sound of the tires on the highway. In any other circumstance the humming of the bus would lull her to sleep, but tonight her mind was racing. It was two a.m. and she was wide awake.
Frustrated, Kristin dug her iPod out of her purse and set it to shuffle. She listened to the first song that came on, nothing. The second, still nothing, and then a third time, finally an answer! A song that related to her and James. It was “Resounding” by Say Anything, one of James’ favorite bands. “Could you stay forever and a day /Together come what may /If only I could say what I'm thinking baby”. She knew it was a sign. Kristin did this a lot. She gave the term “iPod Shuffle” to a whole new meaning. She always tried to find ways to solidify her fate. She would do this by either playing her iPod fate game (picking every third song on shuffle) to find a sign, or sometimes she would determine whether or not someone was thinking about her by whether one of the next five television channels had anything on that reminded her of that person. She knew it was silly, but she found comfort in any sort of validation of what her life was going to hand her next. She knew the future was coming fast, and she wanted to make sure she was ahead of the curve
At five a.m. Kristin was half way home. Exhausted, she dragged her duffle bag and purse into another Greyhound station. All the stations were the same, dimly lit, dirty, and there were never enough seats for everyone. She sat down next to an older woman who was sitting quietly, staring intently at the wall as if all of the world’s secrets were scrawled on its chipping paint. Every few minutes the woman would take a deep breath, close her eyes, and then again shift her gaze back to wall.
Kristin had two more hours before her next bus. She figured she might as well make conversation to kill some time. She looked over at the woman and politely asked her where she was going. The woman simply replied, “I am going home.” She said nothing more. Great. Kristin thought. What a productive conversation. She settled deep into the hard, plastic, fluorescent orange seat and began to count down the next two hours. A few minutes later, the woman looked over at her and said, “I was in North Carolina visiting my father. He is in the hospital. He has been sick for a while now. This may be the last time I will be able make it to see him, but now I am going home.” She smiled and looked relieved, like it had helped to tell someone what her last few days had been like. She saw the same tears behind the woman’s eyes that James had seen behind her own eyes only hours earlier. “I’m so sorry” was all Kristin could say. The woman put her hand on Kristin’s leg and said to her, “You know, it’s funny. When I was your age, going to North Carolina was going home, but now I have my own life, my own home. After my father dies, I probably won’t ever be back to the Carolinas. This was my last trip home.” She drew in another deep breath and said; “You really never know where you’re going to end up do you?” she smiled.
Kristin couldn’t believe what she had just heard. All night she had been waiting for some sort of sign pointing her towards her fate, going as far as putting it into the hands of her iPod. Now a complete stranger, at least three times her age, was explaining the anomaly that had been plaguing Kristin all night.
Soon after the conversation the woman’s bus was called and before she left she gave Kristin’s hand a tight squeeze, and said, “Enjoy your life while you’re young, it goes so fast.” She paused thoughtfully for a second, and then breathed words that would linger in Kristin’s mind long after she left the station that morning, “When you get older, you’ll try to remember all of those little moments that didn’t seem important at the time. The time in between the big events in your life is what you’ll want to remember when you’re my age.” Again she paused, this time her eyes got wider, and for a moment, she had a youthful innocence in her gaze. “Remember what your shampoo smells like, how it feels to be young and beautiful, how it feels to be where you are right now, right here in this moment. Remember all of those things. You still have your life ahead of you, be excited for this beautiful journey not for your destination- because if you only worry about the destination, you’ll come to realize it was the journey that mattered.” With that she left Kristin’s life as unexpectedly as she had come into it. She was on her way home.
Kristin felt a strange peacefulness after that conversation. Her mind weary from lack of sleep, she pulled out the book she was reading in an attempt to get her mind off of sleeping. As she flipped to her bookmark, she felt like someone was staring at her. She looked up to see a man peering down in her direction. A little uncomfortable, Kristin quickly looked back down at her book and continued to read. He sat down next to her and said, “I am always interested when I see someone actually reading anymore, is it any good?”
“Yeah, it’s not bad” she said, moving away from him.
“It’s a good way to pass time in a hell hole like this.”
“I’m surprised you are talking to me, most people seem to be frightened by me-assholes.” Looking at him, Kristin was intimidated, probably only a few years old than herself, the bridge of his nose was pierced on both sides and he had what used to be a mohawk lying down limp to one side of his head. He looked like he hadn’t showered in weeks.
“I hate these damn buses, normally I hitchhike and hop freight trains but my mom was getting scared about it, so she bought me a bus ticket.”
“Where are you going?” Kristin asked interested but upset with herself for keeping the conversation going.
“Florida to stay with some friends; just until it’s not cold here, I hate the fucking cold. I am allergic to it I think.” He laughed. “I can’t stay with my fucking mom any more, she is driving me fucking crazy. I just keep going from place to place, trying to find where I am going. Well, I really should get to my gate. It was nice meeting you.” He hopped up and shook her hand. She smiled warmly, “you too.”
Walking away, he turned back around and said, “Hey! I didn’t ask you where you’re going.” Kristin smiled at yet another strange coincidence with a complete stranger, and replied, “Back home.” He smiled at her in a way that could have only meant he knew exactly what she trying to say. He hoisted his bag up on his shoulder, and continued on his journey.
It was in that moment, six-thirty a.m., eighteen hours after she started her adventure home that Kristin started to understand what James was saying to her in the car. As she looked out at the sea of tired faces all around her, she realized that no one really knew what was waiting for them when they got where they were going. She thought back to her first trip, and the people she had met on the way there.
The boy her age going off to Fort Bragg for basic training, saying good bye to his mother. As he walked away she told Kristin tearfully that she “didn’t know when she would see her baby again.” There was the sixty year old man that sat next to her on the way home last time telling her about how he was going to Cambodia to find the woman of his dreams to bring to the States to be his bride- there had been so many others that she had met on that God-forsaken, broken down, dirty Greyhound. People she would probably have never met in any other situation, people she would have looked down on if she saw them on the street. Here though, if only for this moment in time, they were all the same. They were leaving home, coming home, anticipating the future, forgetting the past, they were all just moving. They were all on there way somewhere, even if they weren’t sure where that was yet.
Finally it was seven a.m. and Kristin was back on the bus completing the final leg of this journey and finally starting to anticipate the beginning of a new one. The sun was rising as the bus pulled out of the station. Kristin didn’t know when she would be back to Georgia. She didn’t know why she didn’t tell James everything she needed to say before she left. She still didn’t know where her life was going or when her “real life” would begin. She did however know one very important thing— for the first time in her life she felt like she was getting a little bit closer.
