Sunrise bus rides

It’s a sign of age to wake before the alarm clock. And so Friday night beers and breaded chicken co-workers break into morning bedsheets; a cell phone sings a travel song. Shake a sleepy head of unwashed hair and strap the backpack on, hand the mobile to the man behind the counter at the corner store. Say taxi.

To the bus terminal with the Dunkin Donuts, coffee and a copy of Coraline from the student library. She discovered the door a little while after she’d moved into the house, just as he discovered the exit to the city some six weeks after all the shopping.

Seat sixteen is waiting, a spot to doze off in the first hundred pages. Wake to mountains gliding like raindrops across a storm window, gold jewelry dropped between the rocks of the river in its morning newness.

A ferris wheel spins a top a parking lot through the green light of the shut bus drapes behind me. The driver hunts for another white man. His girlfriends’ lips curl up, telling me softly to wait another fourty minutes. Ducks poke their concrete heads out of the topsoil; men wade in rubbers through the river.

The bus curves out of the burnt orange exterior into a blackened tunnel, as I’m still dreaming towards the bookends of waking. Before it screeches to its halt, where a girl in navy-white stripes is waiting, the book confirms my dream-state slumber.

So G.K. Chesterton writes, “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”