bioluminescence: I’m on a Bus to Somewhere

I am often the only passenger on it, nestled in the rows and rows of plush seats, with a place to charge my phone, ebbing and bumping over urban hills I didn’t even know existed. Whooshing by the Harlem River—a sparkly beauty behind a chain link fence. I am a six dollar and seventy-five cent princess, just me, on this giant whale of a vehicle. The express bus to the Bronx. It is now almost a daily journey. A new route, but also, several old routes tangled into an ugly-beautiful, convenient-inconvenient one.

Two different express busses travel from Manhattan to the Riverdale section of the Bronx. One bus route begins right outside the design studio where I worked from 2001-2006. It waits, sleeping with its lights off, at the very corner I stood looking down 3rd avenue in the late morning on 9/11/01. It then travels all the way up 3rd avenue and drops me feet from my new job in Riverdale. On the way back into Manhattan, it passes right by the genetics lab on Lexington where I worked from 2004-2013. It is an existential schlep. The other express bus line, on the West side, picks me up right outside the Museum where I worked from 2013-2019. I will never pass these places without remembering. The busses also pass diners I’ve lingered in, drinking what I thought was decaf coffee but wasn’t; shoe stores where I wanted to, but never bought anything; former delis that turned into Duane Reade’s; and even the Duane Reade is closed now too. I can still hear conversations with old friends.

Many times lately I have been the only rider on the bus. And many times I ride the bus from the beginning of its route all the way to the end—both incredibly dubious honors to hold. They are wasting gas on me, and I am ripping them off by only paying $6.75. I cannot tell if I am in the gutter, or I am urban royalty.

These two express busses to Riverdale are dreams. But not your wildest, aspirational kind. The nighttime kind, where people and places from different parts of your life blend together into one scene and then you warp into another dimension and wake up confused yet slightly intrigued. These days, I wake up before the sun, and am on the bus by 7:15 am. For me, this is another dimension. I am not a morning person and to say that this schedule is viscerally painful for me would not be an overstatement. I feel especially sad, dramatic and sentimental at that time of the morning, which all adds to the dreamscape feel of the ride.

In 2014 three scientists won the Nobel Prize for discovering how the brain creates a mental map and navigates the world. They placed a rat in a maze and every time the rat went into certain areas of the maze, specific neurons fired. So, the top left corner of the maze activated the same group of brain cells, again and again. These neurons are called “place cells” and are located in the hippocampus. They didn’t ask the rat if the top left corner of the maze made them lonely or sentimental. And what happens if you put the rat on a bus? Humans have place cells too.

Because I don’t drive, I hardly see these parts of Manhattan stitched together into the same island. I have descended into, and ascended out of, the subways for so long that I have split a few miles, and about 20 years, into what seem like massive individual fragments. The bus reminds me thats it’s all just one city, a time-space continuum with traffic lights, scaffolding, and now restaurants in the bike lane—but mostly—it reminds me of regular days with people I used to know. Because sometimes, places are people too.