It was jaded submission.  It was competition.  It was the breath between hiding and fully addressing the existence of another human body.  This is where she lived.   This millisecond behind making eye contact with a stranger on a bus at 7:48 am speeding through a moping city with her backpack slung around her shoulder, filled to the brim with grapefruits because her 57 year old cancer-hoarding ******* of a father always refuses to sell the grocery store and thinks vitamin C is super important.  She watched tired bodies try to ignore the fact that they were born with legs and brains and hearts.  Motivated by waves of coffee and the kisses their significant others sleepily planted on their foreheads before reminding them to hunker down in their bus seat and get some reading done, she watched these people ignore the fact that a long time ago their parents decided to **** the brains out of each other.  Maybe if she sat there longer one of them would look up from the palms of their hands.  This was a morning like any other morning, a morning without feeling.  A morning without heavy. She didn’t actually care that much.  That was the trick; She just wanted to believe she did.

People, like swarms of ants.  People like tornadoes.  People like an earthquake, running from one edge of the street to the edge of a different alley.  And nobody looked up.  Nobody knew where to put their hands.  This was the thing that got her;  Nobody ever knew what to do with their hands.  It was only when they ignored it, when they forgot the existence of their body that they actually knew how to touch the things in front of them, that they effortlessly existed like oxygen exists without color.  Maybe that was the point of life:  If you wanted to get through it you had to forget you were moving.