7.09.2025

Bus drivers look you in the eye when you board. This is not behavior I notice elsewhere. If anything folks here tend to be aloof, averse to eye contact. Stoic and unrevealing. If it's part of the drivers' training I wonder what the purpose is. Are they checking for suspicious behavior? Signs of madness? I feel self conscious, will surely fumble the transit card as I press it to the reader and let it fall and in my nervousness I will stoop to grab it and the passengers behind me in the bus doorway will have the rhythm of their movements interrupted; a chain of upset expectations, someone falls to the sidewalk, another is concussed, the alarm spreads to nearby pedestrians and streets department workers who in their orange vests make the whole situation look a lot more serious and official than it needs to be and in their distraction a jackhammer goes rogue and cuts through the water main and now the bus driver shuts the engine off and we're all stuck here while I try to get purchase on the lip of the card and it skates further into the bus and there's shouting in French and in English and in Portuguese and emergency sirens break out, where are those coming from, where is all this water coming from, and now I'm about halfway down the fuselage if that's the word for it and I still haven't paid my fare which makes me a hitchhiker and therefore a suspicious person which could've been avoided if I weren't being stared at intently like I had something to hide in the first place.