As Richard steps out of the lobby of his apartment complex, the noise overwhelms his thoughts. He fishes around in his pockets for his travel card as he walks quickly through the bustling throng of people waiting for buses. He finds an unoccupied spot at his bus stop and watches the traffic’s ebb and flow, bright red buses trundling by, inches from the curb he was standing on. He watches the majority of the people around him pile onto a red bendy bus, cramming themselves in before the obnoxious buzzing signaled the sliding doors were closing. A few stragglers jumped on as the doors sucked into the side of the bus, grabbing their bags and pressing themselves in towards the center. Finally, the doors closed and the bus took a deep breath to level out, and finally, it groaned to a start. His bus followed this one, and he clambers on the double decker headed towards the center of town with a small group of other people.
The bus lurches forward as he is climbing the stairs, and as he cautiously made his way to the top, he notices the front two seats are open. Richard had always liked sitting where he could see the city through the oversized windshield clearly. He slides over to the wall and drops his bag into the aisle seat, since he hated sitting next to people if he didn’t have to, and felt that this move was alright as the entire top floor was empty, save for him.
His eyes flit around the scene moving before him, and he watches business people in their suits scurrying around on the sidewalks, cyclists weaving in and out of traffic, mothers and their children, joggers, and the array of other people walking in their own little worlds outside of his window. The bus jumps when it stops and a long stream of people pile into the bus, filling both floors halfway. Richard continues people watching for a few more stops until, finally, he is disturbed by a young woman, as the seat next to him is the only seat left on the upper floor. He drags his briefcase off the seat and places it between his feet on the floor and glances at the woman sitting next to him. She is digging through her purse, and he quickly loses attention as the bus sets off again and the scene around him changes.
He stares distractedly out the window, now not really seeing anything outside, just watching the shapes and movement with idle eyes, and thinks about his wife. He couldn’t bear to think of her as not his wife anymore. His mind creates the image of him sitting in the bus, where he is, except instead of the dark haired stranger next to him, it is his red haired beautiful wife, laughing at something someone outside of the bus has done. Her laughter breaking the usual morning monotony of sound on the bus, and her smile making his heart and mind more awake than they’ve been in the past eight years he’s had to cope without her. That’s all he has been doing - coping, just getting by.
The bus rolls up to the stop before his, and he reaches mechanically for the stop button on the bright yellow pole behind the woman next to him. She slides her legs to the aisle, and he inches out of the row with his briefcase in front of his knees, and his hand gripping the yellow bar as the bus sways side to side with the bumps in the road. He pauses at the top of the stairs until the bus pulls up to his stop, and then he steps down the stairs slowly, following another line of people.
As he steps onto the curb, back into the cold air of mid-autumn, he pulls at the bottom hem of his jacket and navigates the crowd of people. After a few minutes of watching his feet hit the pavement rhythmically, he ends up at the front door of his building. He grabs the photo card out of his pocket and runs it past the scanner, it beeps, and the door unlatches. He steps onto the spotted white tile and is greeted by warm and almost stuffy air.
His shoes tap-tap along the floor as he reaches the lifts, and he presses the call button and the silver door slides open. As he steps in, he catches a reflection of himself in the mirror at the back of the lift, and grumbles to himself. His dark brown hair has silver streaking through the curls, and his scruffy chin shows it’s fair share of spotted white in it’s follicles as well. His eyes look more sunken than he remembers, and his skin looks more wrinkly than he imagined.
The elevator dings and the doors open out to the third floor, and he taps along to his office. He slips the key in and opens the door to the cluttered and ramshackle office he calls his own. The desk is littered with folders barely containing the piles of papers inside, sticky notes, brightly colored memos and announcements, pens, pencils, and general desk toppers - the photographs, figurines, and paperweights some well-meaning colleague or relative gave and did not realize that paperweights are generally useless in modern society. His bookshelves were crammed full of books, along with most of the free space on the floor, and the narrow path between the stacks was itself littered with random bits of office paraphernalia.
Richard steps in and shuffles the papers in stacks to one side of his desk and he sets his briefcase down on top of the desk. He flips its latches open and takes out the small folder and thick notebook from it, closes the lid and piles them on top. He glances at the white, standardized clock on the wall and it tells him he’s actually fifteen minutes early. With that small achievement in mind, he grabs a thin book from the stack closest to his chair and flips open the front cover. It’s a book about Latin American anthropology and he’s been meaning to finish it for months - the loan at the library was almost overdue.
As he’s about to start reading, there’s a tentative knock on his door and a baby faced young man, wearing a trendy scarf and even trendier jacket, pops his head in and gives Richard a nod, after blinking twice as if to clear his eyes. Richard knew he wasn’t expecting him to come in today on time, let alone early, and was probably thinking some hooligan had come into the office and switched the light on.
“Good morning, David,” Richard says as the door hides the peeping head behind it once more. Richard smiles to himself slightly, and returns to his book. He doesn’t ever start reading, though, because he gets lost again in his thoughts. This time, though, on a slightly lighter subject. His colleagues weren’t his favorite people on the planet, and certainly, he appreciated his alone time in his office, but he did find it reassuring that they came to check his office when they expected him to not be at his best. He felt like he was missing out on something, though, something he had previously had a taste of. It was disconcerting for him to realize that he was no longer somewhere he wanted to be, and that it was only his fault that he had given up what he had previously.
In his head, he was already starting plans for something that would reinvigorate his career, and hopefully return him to his beloved post. The clock on his wall kept ticking, invading his thoughts. He glances at the clock again, once he is bothered enough by the ticking, pushes his chair back, and grabs up the notebook, folder, and a pen and strolls out his office door. Letting his feet take him where they knew to go at this time of day, he was still lost in his thoughts when he reached the open door.
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