yesterday on the bus it was cloudy and it made me so happy. i was on the sixty-three, which has mostly old asian laties with big brown smiles gossiping and nice men with moustaches and paint on their jeans that smell like smoke and always say hello, how are you. then at fruitdale street i switch to the twenty-five which contains sick and coughing people, mostly mexican and crying babies and mentally retarded men in baseball caps. the marquee says that it's september 28, 2004 and it's 10:00 am and my arms feel heavy and i get the feeling something very big is going to happen today.

and there you are in front of mcdonald's with my cigarettes and the way you try not to smile and pretend you don't have bright pink hair.

so we smoke and then the cautious small iranian man who teaches me guitar and then we smoke and then we go to class and then we smoke and nothing big happened at all.

today i went to my college class and cut my high school class and took the bus to st. james park by myself to wait for aaron. i shared my sandwich with a man who was digging through the garbage. he sat next to me while we ate and we didn't say anything until he frowned and then smiled and said, "al--rrright. thhank you."

then some ratty punk chick bought a cigarette off of me, and then i talked about photography with a nice man with very rough hands who showed me his minolta something or other. i told him i used to know someone who had a minolta and he took a picture of me smoking with my hood over my eyes.

then i sat under the statue of mckinley, with his swollen eye and telescope with the cigarette butts inside and a strange man called to me from his car, and then parked around the corner and tried to talk to me. i told him my name was melissa and i have a rich boyfriend and that i'm 37 years old, i just have great skin, and asked the cute mexican man next to me in spanish if he would stay there until ese cabron had left. the guy left and my new mexican friend told me that my spanish was chula para una mujer blanca, so i gave him a cigarette.

aaron never showed, so i walked to first and san fernando and took the bus home, where i met a funny irish man who cussed a lot and was very angry at the american public transit system because he missed his train. i saw his rainbow triangle earring and asked him if he was a fag. he gave me a smoke and caught the next train.
i think there is so much beauty in people who have just enough or not enough, even the ones that will bother girls with blond hair who are alone in a park because they are restless but friendly and envy my bus pass but i envy their souls.

i've been thinking a lot about julie, the 22 year old in berkeley because i think i totally blew it because i'm 17 and she thinks i'm 18 but i was 16 when we you know and ohh jeff buckley if i only knew what you were feeling when you said you felt unsteady and where is my love