The Day The Anvil Struck the Hammer

It’s been over two years since I started the accounting course that I am in the final stage of right now. Eighteen months into it, I had to start taking classes in the Big City, which is, as you’d know if you’d seen a few of my earlier posts, a few hours away from home sweet home. As I said, I’m in my last stage here, and if all goes well, I’ll be done by the end of this year.

That’s not what this post is about, no. This one has much to do with the busses I take on my weekly commutes. And there have been plenty of those, let me tell you.

You see, whether or not it’s the same route you take every week, every ride has its differences. Sometimes it could be a good trip, and other times, it could be downright awful. But knowing me, you would probably be realizing now that the third option, i.e. ‘most’ times, are, to me, just funny.

 Every bus ride I take to the City has its special moment, and I don’t mean just the ones like these:

...which are hilarious enough in real life, especially when they happen to you (speaking from painful experience, yes). My moments of note include weirder things that have happened, like the time we were attacked by a cloud of grasshoppers, and oh yes, the never to be forgotten Day The Shoe Held Us Hostage.

Okay, fine, a shoe did not hold a gun to our chests and call the police demanding a helicopter to Rome. What really happened was we got held up one day for like fifteen minutes when a mother couldn’t find her kid’s shoe at her stop. Still, the headline had you going, didn’t it?

To recap, probably every bus ride I’ve taken between home and The City has been special in some way. There was even The Day Nothing Happened, where, believe it or not, nothing happened. I probably had a skeptical expression all through that ride and I spent hours afterwards wondering if there had been anything I had missed.

I chalked it down as a special one, too. Special for not having anything.

One incident, though, happened pretty recently, and if it wasn’t a post-worthy occurrence, none of them were. Here it is:

There I was, getting onto a bus for the long trip home. I stowed by bag overhead, sat back by my favorite right side window seat, plugged in the earphones, and relaxed. I had about five minutes till the bus began to move, and I was already sinking into my ‘travel mode’ state, the semi-hypnotic trance where I start seeing the characters from my books cavorting all around me and busy at work building their plots.

I didn’t notice much as the seats began to fill around me. I usually never do, except to glance at the door once in a while in my trance state and do a quick Sherlock on random people.

This was the day she got in.

She wasn’t one of the super-hot, cheerleader types that usually come fully equipped with a boyfriend driving a Porche, that much was evident at the first glance. She was nothing special, a cute girl probably a year or two younger than me. Most likely scenario, she was heading home after weekend classes, just like I was. Overall, not much different from any other cute girls that might get into a bus.

My astute deductions complete, I turned back to the window, unravelling and filling a plot hole that I had just discovered. When she sat next to me, I was mildly surprised, but didn’t pay much attention. It was probably that the rest of the window seats had already been taken and I was the least unsavory person to sit next to at the time.

Obviously, it wasn’t the first time I’d had a cute chick take a seat next to me. What makes this incident so blog worthy is what happened next.

Oh gosh, the thoughts running through your heads. Jeez, people.

The bus started moving, and pretty soon, I was dozing off. My eyes were closed, and I was in that half-aware state, like on the narrow ledge between sleep and being awake. And you know very well that if you happened to open your eyes for anything at this point, chances were you wouldn’t fall asleep again for the next few hours.

I registered feeling a heavy pressure on my shoulder, and my dreamy mind contemplated this.

Heavy weight. Hmm. Horse flying, arrow flying, swinging sword.

Probably fat guy taking up half my seat. (lyrics of “When Captain America Swings His Mighty Shield…” running through my head)

Wait, wasn’t there a girl next to me? Was that today? Did she leave? Or morph into a fat guy who’s a werewolf in…

Something of that sort. Let’s just say I’m not exactly Sherlock when I’m on the narrow ledge, and leave it at that. Anyway, I somehow put two and five together and got seven on the third try. Someone was leaning on me, and I was curious to find out who. 

The risk here was opening my eyes, the danger of me not being able to reach the ledge again too great a cost to pay. But I was always too nosy for my own good, so I cracked an eye and took a peek.

She was still there, alright. Fast asleep on my shoulder.

For those of you who think I’m making this up, surmise away, but just keep reading. And for the rest of you who are imagining something along the lines of this:

...I have for you my most sarcastic laugh ever.

  

See, before I could even think of a way to react, let alone react in any way, the bus swerved to the right. It was just enough for her head to lift up about an inch off my shoulder. A second later, it fell back, and that was the point when my “No-go-back-to-sleep” problem was taken care of. The bus swerved again, and her head lifted up for the second time, to fall back even harder. And then the driver did it again 

It was, in all honesty, like this:

  

I kept expecting her to wake up with every impact, but nope. It was either that the girl had the literal personification the well-known thick skull, or that she was dead; it didn’t matter, my shoulder was having one hell of a bad day.

It didn’t take me long to decide that I had had enough. I had like two hours left and no idea where she was going to get off. Something had to give way, and and I rather preferred it to not be my arm.

 I turned to her, wincing as she slammed my shoulder again. Just as I was making my mind whether or not to shake her awake, the bus swerved to the right, and she moved the other way. Something finally made her jerk awake, and she turned to see me looking at her.

This was the look she gave me:

Seriously, it was like I was the one ruining her trip.

I would like to tell you that the rest of the way nothing else happened, and that she got off at her stop like ten minutes later. Sigh. If only. The truth of it was, she fell asleep again, all too quickly. And as I had predicted, I didn’t. To rub it in, her stop turned out to be the same as mine, which also happened to be the last stop on the route.

That was probably the longest bus ride I ever had. And yes, for those of you curious to know, my arm was still sore the next morning.

Sounding off: To you single guys out there, hoping to be ‘lucky’ enough to have a girl fall asleep on your shoulder… just be careful what you wish for is all I’m saying.

And that, folks, was The Day The Anvil Struck The Hammer.

Yes, I know. Not the best title. The hammer is meant to be my arm and, well, meh.