Your Four Years at Berkeley
Visual By Sylvia Tirado
The microcosm that is the Berkeley 51B.
You get onto the bus and immediately feel uncomfortable - everyone is looking at you. They’ve been here longer than you have. Your eyes dart around as you search for a seat before getting flung in whatwhich direction. You sit. You readjust your jeans to cover the weird socks you put on this morning when you thought they wouldn’t show. Now that you’re stationary, you do another scan of the grounds. You wonder if there’s someone cute or if that guy in the beanie is the Kingfish bouncer or if that Harajuku-dressed girl is the same one you waited behind at Walgreens yesterday. You wonder if any of these bus-goers were in your class once or go to your gym or whether that man who looks potentially threatening actually is. You’re sweating a bit. You wish you had those little plastic papers for wiping grease off of one’s face. But then you sit for a few stops and you get to know the bus environment and the bus people. It starts to feel less intimidating. Less foreign. And just as you’re beginning to grow in this familiarity, the experienced bus-goers get off one by one. Goodbye beanie boy/Kingfish bouncer, goodbye Harajuku girl, goodbye past classmates and gymmers, goodbye scary man. No cute people to say goodbye to. Nevertheless, there you remain. Another block passes and you have a realization: You are the master now, so sudden and so quick did it occur, You are the all-knowing one, You have become the oldest and most seasoned and greatest bus-goer… You know this bus thirty feet by seven (assuming those are its dimensions), you know the lumpy back profile of the driver and the way his hair doesn’t move even when his head does, his gruff “Yoore welcome” and how his black rectangular sunglasses mimic the shape of the mirror you observe them in. You know that the Trader Joe’s bags are filled with frozen pork dumplings and frozen vegetable stir-fry and frozen spinach palak paneer and milk chocolate-covered pretzels. You know the homeless man in front of you is the crazy kind, not the creepy kind. Sometimes those two overlap, though, in the Venn diagram of safety hazardship. You keep a safe distance but smile timidly if he happens to look up and grab at his several bags: three transparent trash bags, two yellow To-Go plastics, one green grocery reusable, one purple, and a beige tote that reads “Changing the World One Bag at a Time.” You draw ironic connections between the beige tote and the homeless man, between environmental degradation and social disintegration. You wonder if the beige tote is changing the world one bag at a time. It is sometimes hard to see the bigger picture. The bus pulls over to the next stop and - finally! It’s your time to shine. You study the new bus-comers as they arrive aboard with a novel look of smug superiority on your face. Their eyes dart around and their foreheads get glossy. You sit calmly, watching. They avoid your gaze, politely. They grip onto the handles hanging from the ceiling and the poles stabbing through the bus’s skeleton. Their knuckles turn white and their forearms green as the blood rushes upside down towards their shoulder, while their elbows bang rhythmically against a metal bar or the window. Bus-comer bodies sway then get jell-o-ed then jolted, bus-comer faces strain to remain neutral. We all try to pretend like we can ignore how awkward it is when they lose their balance and lurch forward violently, bursting personal space bubbles, shocking us all, feet stomping, stumbling, trying to catch themselves. Once they’ve recovered, they check their outfit in the window reflection and their makeup in their phone cameras. They also wonder about the bus environment and the bus people. If they catch your eye again they look away instinctively, embarrassed. Self-consciousness is a plague. It’s true. But you had it once too.
It’s time for you to get off the bus now, and you scurry past all the current bus-goers so as to not miss your stop. Superiority has been lost to scurrying. You step out onto the sidewalk. You don’t know this sidewalk environment, these sidewalk people. You watch the 51B leave, the thirty foot by seven universe you were once the master of. Those were your four years at Berkeley.
A new microcosm awaits.
