Moving

Moving.

My life is a 2-foot by 1.5-foot by 4-foot pillar of air. Everything is here. Water, food, they lay at my feet. The Bag of Important Things is lodged between my left clave and the outer wall. I am bent forward, my head rests against the thankfully cushioned back of the chair in front of mine. Its pillar-space-owner is a Vietnamese woman. She is demure and sits next to her husband. He smells like Asian B.O.

Headphones in my ears – I am reluctant ot remove them, to bear the vibrations and tones of six different languages streaking through the air all around me, seeking an embrace from a friendly listener. That is not me. A book on my lap; my stare is directed downwards, I am drawn out of this world. For the next six hours I will exist not in this hamster cage, but in the rich texture of fiction.

My bladder is already burning, sloshing against my innards with every kidney-reorienting jolt of the road.

And now, NOW! when the hugely relative term ‘comfort’ has been achieved – a stasis into which I can reduce and condense my very selfhood to these preset borders of space – NOW this Vietnamese woman – who must be wealthy enough to ride a bus filled with westerners but not very wealthy enough to own a car, thus falling into the rarified group of Vietnamese middle class, with all the authority and prestige and immunity that label allows her to self-bestow with respect to the lesser, the more, the ones without – NOW this wife of the smelly man is attempting to recline.

She is throwing her weight against her chair, as if somehow she will shatter the thing blocking its passage: my patella. Which is attached firmly, with ligaments, tendons, cartilage bumpers, to my femur – itself immovable from its pelvic home, which is wedged into the furthest recess of the dark crevasse where my two concave cushions meet.

She is throwing her self with such vigor that I’m sure I’ll break, or at least bend – squashing my legs together in diagonal defeat. She is expending her life box, and diminishing mine. My LIFE. She is taking it and making it hers through some sort of aggressive transferal process I am no good at.

Is there a law of conservation of life space?

God help me this was the chartered bus.