Existential Crisis #1

Now this is fucking silly, but I had an existential crisis, as is often my wont. This happened, I think, for several reasons all at once:

  1. I was in a bus in the middle of Wyoming with nothing around me but desert and a mostly-black sky. I was a body in a metal tube going seventy miles an hour through space.
  2. I had just finished reading a particularly bone-shattering section of Howards End – Leonard Bast in the forest!—and it made me cry, as any decent book does.
  3. I realized that this might actually have been the first moment in my life in which I ever made a choice on my own, entirely alone. That every point of self-improvement I’ve made since being the second-most-unpopular kid in middle school set absolutely no precedent in doing something as obvious as helping an old man get up to pee, and that everything I know about myself is probably wrong etc.
  4. Nothing breaks me like the old and helpless, nothing.
  5. Why wasn’t anyone with him? Why couldn’t he find his ticket? Why did the fucking busdriver just roll his eyes every time the bus came to a rest stop and we had to help him up? Why didn’t he help?

I stared out the window with my eyes fixed on a mass of matter off in the distance, wondering if it was either a collection of high-standing trees or low-hanging clouds. As the highway curved around, the mass disappeared into separate, unnoticeable parts; this doesn’t mean anything at all. In the moment after a crisis of existence you notice these things.

I helped him up at least three more times, and he did become my responsibility, and twice I had to use my booklight to search the bus toilet for his wallet. It was in his back pocket both times. Every time I helped him up, his pants would fall down; after using the toilet, he didn’t buckle up his belt. He said “thank you” and you could tell in his voice that he was trembling with embarrassment.