The Bus To Work

By: Jordan Seifert

For: Va... Valed... Valedia...?

Every day I ride the bus from my home to my place of employment and back again. I know every inch of the route. It rounds thirteen corners and stops an amazing nineteen times. Every day I see the same people, hear the same conversations and watch the same scenery go by. But all I can think of is Mary.

I met Mary when I was ten years old and I still know her now being thirty-nine years old. We used to play games behind my house near the cliff edge, and it was there that her dog slipped and died. She watched his blood pool on the ground and I saw Mary cry and that was when I knew that I loved her. Because even though I had no attachment to that dog, I did to Mary, and her pain was mine.

Over the years I grew to know Mary as not just a friend but as my girlfriend. We first started dating when we were fifteen. We were told that friends should never start relationships but we decided not to listen. At the end of highschool the two of us got married. When I went away for college, Mary came with me. It was a near-decade before I finally became a fully licensed doctor.

Mary had dedicated herself to household things during this time but it was her turn to attend post-secondary school. I paid out of my wages for her to finally attend school, become a nurse and a part of my staff. Mary and I are inseparable. She has an honest sense of caring about her that every patient mentions. They feel loved and taken care of by my wife, and that makes me proud.

I take public transportation because I am supposed to know people. I cannot know them unless I am around them. Every day I see people on the bus in their element, letting their minds go to work, or perhaps emptying them for the duration of the ride. Either way, I find it important. Still though, I concentrate on my wife. She rides the bus as well, always sitting next to me. We do not hold hands any more. Our connection has grown beyond that.

It’s now that I realize, however, that my life is over at thirty-nine. The bus has failed to stop for an unknown reason at the train tracks and we’ve been hit by a passing diesel engine. The bus splits in half, pieces of steel, sparks and fire going everywhere through the air, and my entire life flashes before my eyes. I panic to get it out of the way, because all I want to see is Mary one last time as I’m being whipped through the air, but maybe it’s best not to see her this way. I wonder if she’ll survive, secretly knowing that she won’t.

It’s then, as I am passing out, that I remember the first thing I was taught, almost as a joke by my teacher many years back. When you die, the brain stays active for some ten seconds. It is said that a person may live out an entire second life in those few moments. Another life entirely in their head. And at the end of those ten seconds, when they die in the life created in their head, who’s to say that ten more seconds will not pass in the final moments of that second dream life and so on and so on forever, each life continuing? As I die, all I can think of is Mary, and I know the next life, the life I create, will be centered on her. And the one after that, and the one after that. This is what Heaven must be. Not a place in the sky, but a place in our head, that we will visit again and again after we die, forever reminiscing the ones that we love.