Twenty Minutes to Summit: An Introspective Odyssey

Last term, I had the occasion to take the bus to Summit at Juniper. It was 9pm, and I was on my way to a social hosted by one of the complex’s residents. Along with several of my friends, I boarded the bus at the stop by Webster Avenue. It was cold, one of the first nights of the term below freezing, and snow had just begun to fall. As I sat down, I tried to find a comfortable seat, but this task proved more challenging than expected. The seats were of molded plastic, with not a cushion in sight. What’s more, their patterns seemed designed to make it impossible for anyone over 5’ 6” to fit properly, dooming most of us to aching backs. Naturally, armrests were out of the question. As the bus began its journey to Summit, I drifted away from the conversation, with my mind receding into itself. I don’t know if it was the aroma of outgassing plastic or the snowfall outside that made me unable to focus on mundane matters, but I found myself trapped in pensive thought. 

I began first with a simple topic: the nature of man. I pondered the human condition and whether it truly was the purpose of man. What is our purpose? What makes us who we are? How did all of our choices lead to a society of ridiculously small mini-buses and cost minimization in seat construction? I looked around the bus, trying to guess the nature of my co-passengers. What brought them here? How did we all end up at the same place at the same time? How the hell is that woman sleeping with her head resting on a metal handrail? I looked to the bus driver, his eyes drooping as he looked ahead with the compassionate stare of a man who has seen both too much and too little. He was entirely unconcerned with the world within his bus. He wanted only to complete his shift, clock out, sleep, eat, clock in, and repeat. His life had reached its endpoint. Oh, he would still live for many more years, but he would change little. 

Finding little success in understanding the nature of man, I turned to nature itself. I looked outside and wondered whether there was a God looking back. If every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction, shouldn’t there always be someone staring back at you? You must forgive me, I was tired and not entirely sober, and my grasp of Newton’s Third Law was very sophomoric. My thoughts were periodically interrupted every time the bus went over a stick or turned sharply. The bus’s poor suspension meant I felt every bump, and the driver’s mediocre skills and the frictionless plastic seats meant I slid half-a-foot every turn. Still, I studied the snowflakes as they fell on the windshield and looked into the abyss of night, thinking that perhaps it did look back.

As we neared Summit, I was drawn back into the world like an asteroid is drawn into the gravity well of a star. I joined my friends’ conversations and, when the bus arrived, stepped out onto the Summit grounds.

Four hours later, I was back on the bus. This ride went much faster but minute-for-minute was much more philosophically productive. The snow was falling heavily now, and I drifted from flake to flake, mind out of body and as one with each molecule of frozen water. I felt as though I understood the world in a way impossible to describe with words. No longer feeling the chair as a separate entity, I melded with the cheap plastic and stamped steel. I sank back into myself and probed corners of my own mind that I didn’t even know existed. Something about the claustrophobic bus pushed my mind either far out of or deep into my body, seeking escape from that clown car. By the time I returned to campus, I was a new man, with new resolve. When I stepped off the bus, I could feel nothing, so consumed was I in thought. I walked into the snow wearing sneakers and knelt down, making a snowball with my bare hands. I wound up my arm and aimed at the bus. I knew what I had to do. Knowing no one else could know what I knew. The bus, the vehicle of my transcendence, had to die. The snowball arced through the air and struck the bus. The matter of the snowball and the antimatter of the bus annihilated each other, stripping away its phantasmal energy, leaving it only a shell of metal and hard plastic, piloted not by Charon but by a tired man who just wanted to go to sleep.