The landscape of darkened desert moved past slowly, too slowly, as slow as the images of my past. The thoughts of the damned shot through my mind, like bullets, a thousand bullets that ground me into a pulp.
Who could help me? No one. No one knew about me, the loneliest traveler on a westbound bus, wishing I were the only living thing – animal or human – that existed. Plants I could handle, and all the inanimate objects that don’t contend with mortality. They, at least, had no effect on me.

I hadn’t noticed it greatly at first. Everyone yawns when they see or hear another person do so. It’s an odd instinct amongst humans that can be used as a joke or to see if someone is watching you.
Perhaps that instinct tended too far.
I always laughed at people when they claimed to understand how I felt about something. Like when my grandpa died. Everyone said, “I know how you feel.” When I laughed, they would ask why I was, and I’d reply, “Because you seriously have no idea how I feel! You are not me and he was not your grandfather and you didn’t have the relationship that I had with him.”
But they blamed such outbursts on my mourning.
Somewhere along the way, something connected, something wrong. It was a friend of mine who first noticed.
“You know something funny I noticed?” Lily asked one day, leaning over the space between our desks. Her brows were furrowed in confused worry.
“What?” I replied, curious to understand her concern.
“You just sneezed at the same time as Joe did.”
“I did?” This had to be some strange joke of hers.
But she nodded solemnly. This was no practical joke. Lily looked somber.
“It’s probably just a coincidence,” I denied, dismissing her by returning to my work.
Although Lily didn’t pursue it further, I paid attention throughout the rest of class. Every time someone coughed, I felt an unbearable tickle in my throat, and I coughed too. Every time someone sniffled, I felt a globe of snot at the edge of my nostril, about to slide out and onto the page, but when the person sniffed, the feeling disappeared.
It was strange, but it became so monotonous and normal, I soon took it as a regular occurrence.
The convincing that something was seriously wrong came in another class, much later. A girl was cutting an article from the newspaper and cut her hand on the side. The cut went deep into sinews that gave with little difficulty to the sharp edge. The blood streamed slowly, a bright orange-red, as she was taken for disinfection and bandaging.
As the class watched her go out the door, I felt my own hand shudder with suffering. I turned it over.
It was the same sight as that which had just been displayed! The blood upon the scissors may as well have been my blood, now that the pain was my pain.
I screamed.

I looked down at the bandage around my hand. No one else knew of the curse that had caused it. I squeezed my eyes shut.
The bus had stopped and people were getting on and off. A city lay around us. Although I was in it, I didn’t feel a part of the world at all. More like a specter that merely took up space.
A woman in purple polyester sought a seat beside me.
“Oh, I wish I had a car,” she sighed. “It’s so tiresome riding a bus. Why are you riding the bus, if you don’t mind me asking, of course?”
I stared at her, deciding I could be frank, at least. “I would rather not say.”
She nodded sagely. “Understandable. We all have secrets that some of us would rather not reveal.”

The nurse stared at me, incredulous.
“Did you say you cut your hand with scissors?”
“No, I … this girl, she…,” I stuttered to the frowning woman. Giving up on words to explain, I pushed my bleeding hand toward her and said, “Look!”
The dripping blood, red and full of life, fell steadily onto a paper on the counter below me. It still threw pain through its lost limits, and the skin that blood passed tingled in fear of the red liquid’s fearsomeness.
Her reply shocked me.
“What?” So nonchalant and annoyed.
“I cut myself,” I gaped in a difficult whisper.
“For god’s sake, girl,” the nurse cried, angry, rubbing her hand across the wound and pulling it open slightly, so that I hissed at my torment. “There’s nothing there!”
Other people in the school office were staring.
But I saw her hand come away clothed in fresh crimson! I felt each twinge of my body’s defenses against invading germs. I knew with all my tortured self that this cut was real, no matter how unbelievable its origins.
“At least give me something to bandage it with,” I snapped angrily.
Amazed, she grabbed some cloth pads and bandaging and thrust it into my hands, getting my blood on it. I cursed under my breath, loud enough for her to hear, and left.
On my way out, I was relieved to see her turn towards the sink, no doubt in the effort to remove a phantasm that she wasn’t really sure was there.

“Would you like some?” the woman next to me offered. She held up a tiny wicker basket without a handle which held gumdrops. “They’re fat free, and they satisfy my sweet tooth.”
If my journey were not so solemn, taking me away from everything I knew, I might have had to smile at the soft persuasion in her voice. But I realized with amazement that it was more than a gift of gumdrops she tried to give me; somehow, this remarkable woman knew my great and desperate need to feel close to someone, even if it was a stranger.
“Yes, thank you,” I said. I took a few. She took a few also.
“I remember,” she began, glancing at me keenly to be sure I wasn’t disinterested, “being afraid of people, when I was little. There was this horribly grumpy old man: frazzled hair, bloodshot eyes, and thin and white as a birch tree. He frightened me so badly by glaring at me whenever he passed that I began to fear people, and became really shy.
“One day, coming home from school, there was a crowd outside his house. I asked what was wrong, and someone told me he had collapsed. Well, he stayed a couple of days in the hospital. When he came back, my parents sent me over to his house with some honey from our beehives and a warm loaf of momma’s bread. But to make a long story short, I learned, when I gave him this gift, that he was really not such a bad person, and that I need not fear people at all.”
I wanted to laugh in her face, to say, You too would fear people, as I do, if you were afflicted with my disease and trapped with my nonsensical world as yours!
“You,” I said calmly, “have no clue why I am the way I am.”
She seemed a bit surprised by my hostility, as though she had expected her overture to chisel through my expressionless face. I turned away, longing to tell her, to have someone else know and understand, but the truth was so impossible that I determined then to never speak a word of it.
In silence, the bus carried us. I watched the land change. The stands of trees grew denser. In the near distance, mountains lay, lazy giants upon the blue bed sky, snow upon cracks and peaks and fissures that rarely or never felt sun. Soon, I could make out their unique faces, the bare rock and bristle-thick pine forests stabbing upwards like new hair from shaved skin. It was my destination, looked upon with sad glee and disturbed relief.
Grasping my single piece of luggage, I stepped down from the bus and was shoved out of the way by other passengers. I stood, looking upon the little town and up at its surrounding mountains with butterflies in my stomach.
For a minute, I forgot my plan, and sat on the curb to regain my composure. The bus roared away, coughing out blue-grey smoke that stunk.

“Where have you been?” Mom cried.
“Out,” I replied, sniffling.
“Without calling?” She now sounded worried, rather than angry.
“I… I need something.”
“Oh no. Are you in trouble?”
I shook my head, but then I nodded. I had to ask for a bus ticket; I didn’t have the integrity to run away.
“What is it?” Mom asked. Her mind was open and I saw it, as all teenagers learn to do to escape the fiercest parts of impending punishment.
“I… I…. I need a ….bus ticket.”
“What? Why?”
Shock, fear, disbelief, acceptance were all in her eyes. I saw this with the same sagaciousness as I would later see the offer of gumdrops.
Oh Mom, I might as well be dead, and be better off than I am now!
“I can’t explain. It wouldn’t make sense. I just need you to do this for me, and if I ever figure it out, well, then I can come back or something. But I have to leave. I have to!”
Mom stared at me. I was sure she was going through her memories of me, from conception through until now. I knew with what great fire, understood, that she loved me eternally.
“On one condition,” she said quietly, recognizing with heartache that this great need, whatever it was, was too great to be denied.
“Alright.” Anything, Mom, just trust me and give me hope.
“Write to me.”
So perhaps that is why I leave this, as memoriam.