Thumbnail: Transitway

On days like this, it’s bet­ter to wear light cloth­ing, and throw on a hooded wind­breaker. The rain out­side is just a driz­zle, so it’s com­fort­ably cool. Pay no atten­tion to the hydraulic hiss of the wind­shield wipers, or you won’t be able to help hear­ing them through the quiet parts of every song. Window seats are prime. There are fewer dis­trac­tions from peo­ple walk­ing down the aisle.

The 95 goes from one end of the city to the other, straight through the heart of Ottawa. Every stop is a mem­ory. Old haunts. Past lives.

Here was your first apart­ment. Sometimes you’d find Christie wait­ing for you here on the benches between classes. How long ago those days seem, how imma­ture and rel­a­tively inno­cent. The next two stops are on the edge of the uni­ver­sity cam­pus, four years of scat­tered tru­ancy. Two stops later is where you use to buy a medium caramel cor­retto every morn­ing after an exhaust­ing night with Louise. Your old gov­ern­ment office is another two on. The con­crete build­ing looks so for­eign now, and you won­der if the same peo­ple are still inside. Another few stops is your last apart­ment, before buy­ing the house, the end of bus rides home every day.

Music never meant so much.

You pass by con­struc­tion sites, fin­ished build­ings, see the evo­lu­tion of the city.

Every stop can be traced to a dif­fer­ent point, a dif­fer­ent girl­friend, a dif­fer­ent path in your life.

Six years of expe­ri­ence, six years of shift­ing, ever-changing anima.

Six years passed.

Six years lived.

Six years grown.