On the bus, I am not on the bus.
Three minutes waiting is better than nine minutes spent walking to catch a metro that’s most likely going to keep you waiting two minutes. Because of this time-conscious logic, I decide to suede boot clickety-clack to the bus stop. There’s the old lady who is, in my mind, named Françoise because that seems like a thoroughly old-fashioned, elegant Parisian name, and she is robed in a perfectly displeasing brown coat. There’s also a flat, short-brimmed hat to match. I can’t tell if Françoise’s hunch is a slouch or actually part of physique. Either way, I’m not about to stare because her watery eyes are too lifeless to belong to a living, breathing human being. It’s creepy.
I pull out my book to pass the time because, believe it or not, three minutes of waiting can feel excruciatingly long in the biting, January cold. Once I pulled out Stefan Zweig’s Marie Antoinette, another time it was The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, and today it is probably Guerre & Guerre by the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai. I’m excited to be reading this because it’s in French – one more thing that convinces the strangers in my life that I am a legitimate Parisian. However, at the moment, I am hardly reading because every few seconds I glance down the street, anticipating my ride to work. Little Volkswagen Golfs zoom by and the motorcyclists dance in between. They know who has the traffic advantage here.
Finally, the bus arrives and I pull out my transit pass. Politely, I let the older people on first, the parents with strollers, the fidgety man with the battered suitcase, although it’s something I regret immediately because they all seem to use individual tickets. Even after I’ve scanned my pass which takes all of three milliseconds, I must patiently wait behind the people validating tickets. And when I get through, I avoid the seats at the front because there is actually nothing worse than sitting in a reserved seat and then being glared at by some jaded, Charles de Gaulle freak two stops later. So I’m relegated to the back seats and not just your plain ol’ normal back seats, but the back seats that are parallel to the wall. If you want to look out the window, you either have to stare straight ahead and risk the person opposite you thinking you’ve been creepily gazing into their eyeballs for an agonizingly long time or twist your body sideways like you’re in a constant state of stretching. I opt to keep my book open and just pretend to read. Otherwise, I’ll get motion sickness.
Within a matter of stops, a seat facing the right direction opens up and it’s also next to the window. This is perfect. I lean my head against the cool window and the bus’ movements send aggressive shocks through my body. My book is closed and comfortably back in one of the large pockets at the front of my navy blue peacoat.
On the bus, I am not on the bus.
The sights bumble by. As we drive by the Champs de Mars, I see Chinese tourists huddling around a pink polka-dotted umbrella-toting tour guide who gestures grandly towards the Eiffel Tower. He is supposedly speaking in the strange intonations of Mandarin as he relays Gustave Eiffel’s most prominent creation. The cobblestones on the street make the bus jump as it passes the high-security École Militaire entrance where soldiers, not older than twenty-five and garbed in typical green camouflage and floppy black berets, stand guard with unreadable expressions. They’re beautiful.
What would Linda say about them? My thoughts begin to wander to those people, those places, and those things that I love so unconditionally and so painfully yet were thousands of kilometres away. I daydream about Dom, his wide smile, his intense passion and enthusiasm that was very obvious every Wednesday evening as we sat next two each at a large table, Skully the Skeleton posing behind us and the orange shag rug placed warmly in front of the electric fireplace. Up close, he wrote the craziest things, wholly believed in my ability as leader of this activity uniquely called Creative Words, and gave me the best hugs. And from afar, I confess, his thick thighs, toned from years of recreational rugby and hiking, captured my attention, as did his tightly curled, floppy hair. Where are Dom’s eyes, alight with life, when I need them most? Why is it that I made my admiration for other boys so clear yet with Dom I never once said anything? We all know the answer and it is excruciating, “Because I love him so much that it would be better to be good friends than be nothing at all.” Right, because telling him how I felt would have instantly resulted in the silent treatment.
He would like my home, I think. Because of the outdoors aspect. The close-knit trees, the way the forest seems to invade the city and not the other way around, the way that we feel so isolated because we are at least nine hours from the next biggest city and yet we have everything we need here. Mummy seems happy there. It is undeniable that my love for my hometown has grown significantly since leaving home all those years ago and this is mostly due to the fact that amazing people live there. There’s Kate, the artist and sentimental best friend who is facing the constant struggle of bulimia. Brianne, the sporty, average girl-next-door with the mediocre boyfriend and we share far too many memories together. Jackson, the five year old with too much energy so he screams “I LOVE YOU” into the phone when I call home at one o’clock in the morning GMT+1. Mummy talks about Brent a lot and I wish I knew him better, I wish the two had meant years ago because then I would understand the father figure, the importance of good guys. Because I’ve only ever had nice guys, not good guys.
Tu me manques, the French say. You’re missing from me. There are too many things missing from my life; I am a puzzle that was happily complete the first time and then, over time, pieces slipped under the couch, were eaten by the dog, or sucked up by the vacuum cleaner. Now, I am an incomplete puzzle. The cornerstones of my life have vanished and, as far as I can tell, they are not about to be replaced either. I am a missing person.
On the bus, I am not on the bus.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
125,009 Literary Works • 672,837 Reviews
Lavvie, I didn't intend to read this. I read your description of the project in the writer's corner and was interested, but also need to be doing my homework, so I didn't think I would have time and started closing the three tabs I had open. But I read the first line here accidentally and couldn't stop.
The first thing I need to tell you I love is the refrain: "On the bus, I am not on the bus." The first time I hear it, it is literal and simply making a rhythm. It feels, to me, like an inversion of "I am not on the bus, on the bus", kind of like an echo. The next time I meet it, however, the phrases feel more connected and necessary: "While I am on the bus, I am not really on the bus" because the character is thinking about other things, not about being on the bus. It's the same feeling in the last one, but wraps it all up nicely.
One thing I did notice that stuck out to me was that in description of people the character actually knew, it felt somehow more flat and artificial than when she/he described Francoise. Especially when she/he was describing friends back home, it felt like those two-dimensional quick descriptions of characters on the back of a YA book (to pique interest) or in a TV show description (to do the same). Nothing's inherently wrong with describing that way, but it didn't seem to fit with the thoughtfulness of the rest.
I liked following the character's genuine train of thought. I felt something familiar -- I felt that magic that comes with living in a country that is not your own, where everything feels magical and deep just because it's new and different. Where even friends are more dear to you because without them, in this new place, you'd be lost. I could see that between the lines, and that indescribable sensation of a new palate of smells. So thank you for bringing that to me, even though I was thinking of Prague.
PHEW BACK TO HOMEWORK NOW. Thanks again, and let me know if you have any questions about this brief review. Whenever you're ready to really dig into it, I'd be happy to look more carefully, too.
Hannah
Hi Hannah! Thanks for the review. For some reason, I only just saw this now! I'll be revising my pieces for Saturn when I've written them all. Definitely agree about the flat descriptions of people - I think I kind of rushed through that, when I should have fleshed them out in different ways.
Thanks again <3
Hello Lavvie, Pretzel, your favorite snack, here to rescue your Saturn Project from the Green Room. I will also try to review the work "Revisiting Abracadabra" sometime later, maybe tommorow. Anyways, let's get into it, shall we?
I feel like this specific piece of prose really jumps around a bit from topic and topic. And yes, I do understand that this is pretty much freestyle prose, but then again, I think that you need to have at least one central/main idea that the reader can actually identify with a little bit. Actually, I had to read this over a couple of time for my brain to actually understand what was going on, and what varying emotions were going on throughout the characters. I guess one suggestion how to fix that is to work on one specific emotion, or work on one specific memory,etc.
I think that it's quite neat that you are reinforcing the first and last sentence by repeating it, and I have to say that it doesn't even seem out of place of forced. To me at least, it seems like it has a natural flow to it, so dibs on that. I would say that this may be a common oxymoron in fact. That middle one however, seems to be out of context a little bit, out of place because it's forced to be a transition from one thought bubble to another thought bubble which it honestly shouldn't be.
As an avid observer, I think that this narrator is doing great, but maybe that's why most of this prose is no "off-topic in the sense that it really skips those topics all around. I think that if you keep a central area of observation or thought that this person should be doing, then that would be great. As an avid observer myself, I really appreciate something like this, a first person perspective into their thought, without technology interfering, just their eyes and the object being studied.
Now I'm going to try and get into a little bit more detail, going line by line and paragraph by paragraph:
This is something that my reviewer friend told me, was called purple prose. Or a bit over-flowery. That phrase seems to include the fashion choices of the shoes that the character is wearing, if I am assuming that correctly. The question is: Why is that important to the story? Because if I recall, there is no other time that this shoe actually come up again.
Ahh, I was so very excited to see reading choice and book choice influence the narrator's character. I think that this is really neat thing to do, because I honestly believe that you call tell a lot of things about a person by seeing what they actually read/don't read.
I feel like the third paragraph in your work, is a big info dump on your setting, for the reason being that you describes a passing setting a little bit too transit and moving and the scenery is changing as it's moving,etc. I personally don't think that I need to know specifics on the bust is set up exactly and so on and so forth.
How can she even hear what language these people are speaking, if she's supposedly sitting inside an insulated bus at this point in the story? Oh, and the umbrella, I am just going to assume that it's raining outside. If so, then why don't you mention something like that at the beginning of the whole scene so that we visibly can visualize the weather patterns.
So, I know that only a grammar nerd would literally define what a noun is in their sentence. The thing is though, for me it doesn't matter, because this already makes sense. I know what a noun is, it's so obvious, so you don't need to go so in-depth at listing what she misses from home. I feel like this is rough and it kind of takes away from the message of nostalgia.
I, as a reader completely skipped over this part, because it just is so much proves to have so much fundamental telling and just not enough narrating. This is a mistake that I see many writers make, where they just kind of list all new characters in two neat sentence and that's it. But I think that even though for ex. this is a short story, you still need to develop the character's enough so that we can even connect with them at all.
With this narrator, I haven't really understood what they're going through or connected with them at all that much, which actually isn't your intention obviously. You wanted to create a piece that reflected a bit of nostalgia, and while it is evident that you tried to do so in your writing, I didn't really feel like. I guess that the missing component, like Yuriiko points out, is not plot at all. Just a rolling ball/string of ideas. Here is an article about that. It basically describe you in detail the five essential part of fiction, which you may already be familiar with (exposition,rising action,turning point(climax), falling action, denouement). Sorry to say that I haven't seen any of those things.
I also noticed this article, which points to not getting carried away. Personally, I don't think that you necessarily had too much description, it's just that maybe one of these points pertains to you: "Forget about small things". I mean obviously observing is still your best friend and such, but try to totally avoid those small irrelevant details that clutter up your writing space.
Lastly, the switch of languages is so fitting, and I honestly have to say that it seems like the character has a deep respect for that language, and shows sign of fascination, even though this may not be their native language and such. Thumbs up on mixing that!
That's all that I have for this short story. Hopefully, I will go on to the first installment of this to have all three pieces reviewed there for you, as I promised.
I hope that this review helps you improve and if you have any question, then please feel free to let me know!
~P.S.
Hello lovely Lavvie!
This was refreshing to read. The main character's thoughts combined with nostalgic approach were expressed well in the story. However, I think this piece was more like a fragment and less of a story.
It didn't really stand on its own. There was no conflict and it focused on the character's hindsight without developing a plot. It felt like you were implying a metaphorical perspective (I'm not sure) but it came off as vague, it was difficult for me to connect with the character. Also, not to mention the constant introduction of new names in this piece didn't really help. This could break off your reader's attention from the MC, leaving us grounded everytime just so we could link each characters mentioned. Perhaps slow it down and let it pace naturally. Add new information here and there but not in one place, too much spoonfeeding isn't really a good idea right?
Secondly, I also noticed few sentences that could've been phrased differently. I'm not much for grammar (heck, I'm still terrible at it) so I suggest rereading this piece. I have also noticed you tend to rely on adjectives and adverbs which resulted to a weaker prose. Well I'm not saying to overdo your description either, just enough to give us a clearer vision while balancing it out with your MC's thoughts and emotions.
Overall, this has a lot of potential. I enjoyed reading this and I think it was interesting, but as what I've said earlier, build a stronger foundation to this piece. I may have read this differently to what you were actually trying to portray here. But oh well, everything's solely based on my views and opinions. If you have any questions, please let me know!
Keep writing and peace out!