Everyone else is weighted down by gloom, and while it feels strange to covet their sadness, that’s what I do. Someone has died, a celebrity I’m unfamiliar with. If I admit my ignorance there will be a deeper chasm and I can’t allow that to happen because the strangest things frighten me: gaps, ellipses, distance and dirt, echoes.

On the bus people are living. I watch a woman bury her ruddy face inside a bible and gasp with eyes closed. A teen with hair shorn to bristles and skin drawn taut around his temples grins like a starving skull, bobbing to inaudible music. The little girl in the back sits alone and gauges everyone else’s reaction by angling their reflections in the window glass. That child is me but no one realizes it. Sometimes I’m not even sure.

When I told my teacher my life was boring, that I have nothing to write about, she said, “What about your mother who killed herself?” I wish she hadn’t said that out loud in class. Although she may have wanted to die, Mother never committed suicide.

The reason I’m on this bus is I need to go somewhere. It’s hard not to envy people with a destination in mind. I’ve gone to all sorts of different places. I’ve walked the cemetery until I found Mother’s tombstone and I’ve also visited my father in prison. Sometimes I’ll ride the bus for hours and never get off until it’s late evening, and then when I do step into the street, I hold my head high like a proud statue and never look back.

I have a collection of found articles, mostly torn ticket stubs, but some others– change, a set of car keys, a syringe, condom wrappers, cherry-flavored cough drops, and a crucifix. I found a wallet once. The owner was handsome with hair as black as crow plumage. The man had three children. Not one of them resembled me or anyone I know, but something hinted familiar. In any event, I immediately fell in the love with the son whose name I pretend is Edgar.

Now when I ride, I take Edgar with me or I imagine I am on the way to a rendezvous. I’ve read in a magazine how romance is dead, but I don’t believe it. Sometimes it’s good to make up your own truth, facts and conditions.

My chest does a war dance every time I hear the vehicle approach. Today the bus is airplane-loud, gassy stinky, dust-coated from the drought the city’s been slapped with.

The driver knows me well. Buck is his name, which is just another irony since his sunken eyes are as green and untrustworthy as a dollar bill. His hands are girl-smooth, his fingers sharp and spindly. He always winks when I get on, but that’s okay, because even later, after all the passengers have disappeared and it’s just him and me, it’s an easy exercise to conjure Edgar. Here’s what I do: I close my eyes, hold my breath and speak a silent prayer, then I picture Edgar and I riding in an old-fashioned carriage or coach. In my mind, I take Edgar’s hand and he kisses my knuckles and everything is perfect.

You can call me silly or crazy, I don’t care because I’m a romantic as well as a survivor. I’m convinced that love’s what we need in order to endure life’s little holocausts. But this is just me thinking, my belief, another one of the laws I’ve created to get me past this place and onto the next.