Friday, July 24, 2009

I could feel the girl next to me on the bus looking at me. She was peering at my face with a strange kind of concentration. I kept looking at my book, but I felt a nagging sense of discomfort. She was watching my face closely, her wide eyes hardly blinking. Whenever I made a slight head movement, she turned away quickly, but let her eyes settle on me once I lowered my head to the page again. Her eyes were wide and took up most of the spaces on her face, this was not something I saw, but simply sensed. It was unnerving, this feeling of the big eyes on my face. She was studying me closely. I controlled my breathing and kept staring at the crawling words on the page. It was started to irritate me, what was she looking at?

I jerked my head up quite suddenly, I turned to look at her. She turned away then pretended that she had been looking out the window the whole time, not my face. She was a young girl, probably sixteen. She had straw blonde hair and, as I had guessed, wide eyes. She had an astonished look, it was not unpleasant. In fact, she was quite pretty. But I felt an intense sense of fear that stabbed me quite suddenly so that I had to look back down at my book. She had been studying me, I was sure. It was really creepy, those jelly bright eyes that stayed on my face like some kind of wet creature that had landed on my face and stuck there. Her gaze was limp and hollow. The thought struck me quite suddenly, the girl is probably crazy.

The bus bumped along Columbus street steadily. It was nine in the evening and the sky had already darkened into a velvet black. It was starless but the lights from the many store and restaurant signs made up for the lack of stars. They blinked and blazed. I kept my eyes on the page. I turned it over slowly, I found it hard to read when the girl was staring at me so strangely. I was reading a short story compilation and the story I was reading was by a Lisa Grillan, it was flat and uninteresting. I looked at it merely to avoid the gaze of the girl that was thrown on my face like a head beam.

My only thought was: Creepy creepy creepy. The bus bumped half-heartedly down the familiar Stockton street. There was still fifteen minutes before I get off. Oh God, please don't let her start a conversation with me. I have seen too many crazy people on San Francisco buses to return a crazy gaze. The best strategy was merely to ignore the crazies. Pretend that she was not sitting next to me and was not looking at me like I had a hole in my face that only her sticky look could fill.

The words drift past me without any real emotional grip. Besides, I was starting to think of octopuses. The girl's eyes were starting to remind me of a giant octopus I had once seen in an aquarium. It extended its tentacles and flopped around, throwing its arms out like a giant net, gulping the darkness in the tank greedily. Greedy for the darkness, for nothing at all.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her watching my face closely. She glanced over at my book once in a while nervously. I could see her hands, they were clenched and white in the knuckles. She was twisting them in agitation. I was determined to read on even though the story was uninteresting and the narrative voice dry. I signed loudly deliberately. She glanced away. I hastily turned the pages in the book to see how many more pages I had to read on before the story ended. Three more pages. I wondered if I would finish it before I reached my stop.

The girl was insistent in trying to make eye contact, several times she inhaled deeply as if she was about to start a sentence then changed her mind. Two stops before mine, the girl stood up and got off the bus, she did not look at me when she got off. I was one page away from finishing the story.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Immediately, the air felt fresher and lighter. The heavy sense of weight and gravity that seemed to drag itself on me and the flimsy page of the book was lifted. I raised my shoulder and shook my head from side to side to clear that heavy sense of unease.

I closed the book. I would return it at the library, it was boring and the narrative voice unappealing to me. The author's picture on the back caught my eyes. There was something familiar about those huge eyes. They reminded me of sea creatures lurking in dark caves under the ocean. Just like one of those octopuses' eyes. Even the light blonde hair in the picture was not enough to give those eyes light. They just seemed to suck and suck. I thought of the girl on the bus. I wonder if she knew that I had finally finished the story that she didn't have to worry. Thoughts are altogether quite private and boredom is not easily revealed.

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