Sometimes moments pass without us being aware that we’ve lived through them. As if somehow we skip over them, and they’ve never really happened at all. Suddenly, you’ve arrived, and the in-between of how you got there is nothing but a faded memory clouded by blurred edges.
Without knowing it, Johnny found himself seated in his comfortable window seat. It had become so routine that he didn’t often process the movement of stepping onto the school bus, shuffling his bag and violin case through the narrow walking isle, and finally dropping himself in his assigned fake-leather brown bench. It wasn’t actually comfortable at all, but by his standards it was just fine. As he had never really known anything better to compare, he never questioned such things. Johnny got the entire seat to himself for exactly two stops, before his seat buddy would join him. Not that sharing a seat together was significant at all. In the morning, Johnny was silent. Sometimes he was silent in the afternoon too, but always in the morning. That was his adventure time.
Pulling out his silver Walkman, he fitted the foam padded ear-muff-style headset over his temples. He had a case of multiple CDs that contained his life’s collection, already growing with eclectic sounds; but it wasn’t necessary on this particular morning. This morning the CD he wanted was already loaded into the player. He simultaneously pressed the play button and tapped the volume control more times than was necessary, to guarantee it was well past the max volume setting. Just the way he liked it. The bus released its brakes and began to drive off. With the beat reverberating through his bones, Johnny turned his gaze out the window and quickly drifted away from that seat. Soon he was lost in another world.
Watching out the window, a movie played out before his eyes. Moments, hours, an entire life condensed into that eighteen-minute ride. The trees and fields and houses they drove past turned into jungles and deserts and oceans. Shapes would shift and he would jump from universe to universe with the blink of an eye. In one instance he drew a sword during an epic medieval battle in a never-ending forest. The next he soared to the heavens, self-propelled with nothing but his fitted suit and cape lapping in the gusts of wind, dancing in and out of the clouds. Dramatic scenes exploded across the canvass of his window’s gaze, all as real as the sights before him. Absorbed in every observable detail that could be seen from that window, he was absent inside a complete abyss that engaged his mind, both at the same time. Staring intently at everything, without looking at any one single thing at all.
The Walkman continued to spin on repeat while the bus continued to drive on, and Johnny stayed lost in that other world, as the moments continued to pass by.
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