Maybe Tomorrow

All I can think of is the woman's delicate features. Her petite little body with a hint of birthday cake caboose. With her striking auburn hair, that curls gently to her shoulders. That porcelain face that looks as though its been carved out of tinted ivory. Her soft golden eyes that stare ever vacantly into the soft netherlands of space and place and race.

She's a teenager, or maybe she's just barely 20, and she's got the whole world in front of her and the whole world behind. She stares out the window of the bx1 bus winding its way slowly along the Grand Concourse, her expression as dead as the lifeless trees that line the street on this morning in late fall.

Why does she look so empty, I wonder to myself. Why is she so sad? Does she have a grandmother sick? The one who took her in when her mother sent her to live here in the United States when she was only 14? 

Grandma. The person who had coached her through those difficult high school days when she had struggled with English, and dreaded the humiliation of getting made fun on account of her accent.

Grandma. Abuela. Who reminded her that she had come to the country alone, with no one to cry to. Working 13 hours shifts in the hospital laundry, making pennies. Who had lived a roach infested apartment building, in a 2 room apartment with 7 exhausted bodies.

Grandma. Abuela. Tata. Who had left her family in the DR when her children were still in grade school, to forge her own path in the United States. Who didn't care about what the parents of her dead husband said, when they screamed that she was abandoning her children just at the time when they had lost their father. Who did what she had to do in partly to support the whole family, and partly for her own sanity.

She would never call herself a feminist, but she was fiercely independent. She did only what she wanted. She visited the DR often, but never enough, and knew that her children were growing up, supported by her dollars, but without her guidance. She owned this fact, but never questioned her decision. When she'd gotten a chance to raise the child of one of her children, she did not blink, for she knew that the had neglected her own. 

Maybe this girl on the bus seems dead because her Tata has cancer. Perhaps she's smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes her whole life, and, at 65, the effects are finally making themselves known. Maybe the vacancy registering on the young girl's face is bewildered shock. 

Yes. Yes. Or. 

It could be the boyfriend that's making her grim.

 He's probably a massive guy, with an authoritative swagger. Maybe he was a football player in high school, or something. That's probably where they met, right after a game she'd come to with her friends. Maybe she had been a senior then, and he only a bold sophomore. Perhaps she was still self conscious about her English, but she had an idea of her beauty because she can feel the eyes that constantly stare at her. The truth is, she probably knew for awhile that men looked at her. Maybe this boy was the first one to make a move. After the game? Near the bleachers? After Dark? Cool fall breeze, and the smell of distant halal food from a cart wafting towards them?   I can see them, her and him, exploring each other's every nook and cranny, in a fit of jagged ecstasy. 

 Maybe she was happy when the first started off all those months or years ago. Maybe she'd even laughed when she was with him. Perhaps, though, the same thing that happened there that probably happened to her everywhere: she got bored. 

Boredom. Dull, drab, nothing-going-on-dom. Ugh, gray, everything-the-same-dom.

 Is that why her delicately rouged lips are always pursed in a lifeless expression. She probably works.  That's where she's going this morning on this bus. Or, maybe she's off to the community college. It strikes me that Tata probably wants her in school. She has always been a stickler on education, and also thinks that school is a great place to meet people. She likely encourages her grand-daughter to be more social.

  I can't imagine this little woman partying, but she probably does, sometimes.  She drinks a little, and she doesn't mind smoking weed. She never overdoes it though, ever. She probably goes with her hulking boyfriend, and turns the other way when he cheats on her right in front of her. She knows, as she's always known, perhaps, but it just doesn't matter. 

 Well, here she is, standing up to depart the bus, staring ahead with those priceless eyes, those eyes that say there's nothing inside. 

When she walks by me, I want to scream. 

"CAN YOU SEE  ALL THE FACES THAT PASS YOU BY?  DID YOU EVER KNOW THE PLEASURE OF DAWN'S FIRST LIGHT?   WHEN YOU WERE A GIRL, DID YOU DREAM OF PRINCESS? OF CASTLES AND KNIGHTS, AND DASHING PRINCES? SMILE, CHICA, SMILE PLEASE, LIFE'S TOO SHORT, TO LOOK SO MEAN!"

In my mind, everything rhymes but I know that what I have to say is too nuanced for all that. Maybe tomorrow I'll find the words that will matter. Maybe then I'll let her know.