a bond so instantaneous

Billy Jonas has a song called "The Bus” (lyrics) (listen) in which he shares a few anecdotes of fellow passengers he met while riding the bus across America. A father goes to bail his young daughter out of trouble, a young man heads off to boot camp to avoid gang violence, and a Native American woman teaches Billy how to kill rabbits with a stick (before cooking them with instant onion soup mix.)

The point of the song is the bond, the trust that arises amongst travelers in a single vessel, the breakdown of suspicion in favor of camaraderie and straight-up love. It’s a subversion of our natural fear of strangers, and an assurance that it isn’t so odd to let your guard down, to get close and be vulnerable because we’re all in this thing together

I wept over this in the sun on a beautiful day at sea, so happy to be on the boat with strangers, getting to know them, hoarding the small intimacies they shared with me.

We have so much to learn from each other. Each of our lives represents a perfect example of what it means to be a human being. I can only live from this one seat, from these feet and this brain and this set of predetermined and acquired circumstances. Whenever I talk to someone new, it feels like a bonus round of life, a tiny taste of what it’s like to be that person, to think their way and experience what they have. It gives me the most expansive thrill, that spontaneous moment of closeness when we break through our conceptualizations of each other as “other” or “foreign” and find common ground.

Of course this is Marina, too. Her words shake in me everyday. I reread and think about her and it feels something like studying scripture; enigmatic enough for multiple layers of analysis but prescriptive and instructive. Important. It feels good, painful like a workout or an overzealous massage, but good.

Good today at least. Mourning can be like the weather, capricious and unpredictable.