instructions for a romantic bus ride

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1. take your glasses off. watch the bus window turn to soft-edged stained glass, green and red and amber lights careening by as firefly orbs, a pointilist painting whizzing before your eyes in an electric dance. be careful though- you might miss your stop, because you can't read.

2. throw on your windbreaker, backwards, over your arms and chest. they act as a security blanket- from the shrill jet of cold air frosting your arms from the air conditioner above, and a protective barrier from the plagues of the world beyond this moving vessel you sit in momentarily.

3. plug in your earphones and play your tunes- the special "night drive" playlist you carefully curated on spotify that you mainly use for commuting on public transport and not in the car, because you're 14 and you don't have a driver's licence nor a vehicle of your own. also it's 4pm in the afternoon. but no matter, it's about the journey and not the driver anyway. listen to the sounds of major sevent chords looping over and over again punctuated with a muffled, delayed drum track tickling your eardrums. if you focus on aligning your soul to the music, your heart won't be the only organ beating in exact time to it, but your brain waves will pulsate in rhythm, sending and receiving good vibes on the same wavelength of these hallowed new age sounds, the frequency of the whispered secrets of the universe.

3. close your eyes. let your inner pendulum ball swing in rhythm to the turns and brakes and vibrating pauses of the bus. you can try to predict your exact geographical location purely by memory, although your mind either moves too fast or too slow to pinpoint where you are accurately, always out of tandem, asynchronous phasing in and out of reality. or, you can imagine a whole other reality itself- a ship careening through space, hopping over asteroids, swerving past satellites, curling round the orbit of moons and stars. your vehicle ploughs through and you imagine humps as roadkilled extraterrestrials, their bodies ironed flat through the middle as you are chaffeured along the milky way in uncaring motion.

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