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