Missed Buses

The heat from the Santiago city bus assaults her face as it zooms away. She lowers her hand still in its futile desperate wave hoping to gain the driver’s attention.

Sadly she knows she had succeeded but the driver just scoffs at her while shoving the gear-selector into second and leaving them in a cloud of dust.

Welcome to the big city, whether Chili, New York, or somewhere in Asia, everyone is always in a hurry and humans just get in the way.

Kara turns and waits for her camera-wielding husband, Nate, to catch up.

When he joins her he shakes his head, disappointed also.

She feels like doing anything but putting on a good face for her Youtube fan base and the ‘catch the bus to the hotel,’ segment they were filming for their channel, but tries anyway.

“No, problemo,”  she says exhausted into the camera. The always present camera. The thing that both compels them both to keep going, to fill its void with more, more, more. It has recorded countless footfalls and mouthfuls, every sigh of contentment, annoyance,  doubt, and fear. Its beady black eye, with her own twisted reflection leering back, records the truth in that lie. That problems are what amount to existence. The unblinking- fact of the matter- moment after moment existence that they both seek to record and share.

And now she fears this is too much. A month in on their second year of traveling fulltime and she needs a break, food, sleep, not to feel her beloved Nate’s presence glued to her side or the constant drone of engine and tires on asphalt.

Problems are existence and success tears against the lie perpetrated by mainstream media, that the only way to win is through perfection, being blemish free, doing the impossible and surviving.

Surviving, that’s the key. Live to see the sunset or the next pizza, because eventually, both will always come.

For them, for anyone, there is no surviving, not on the long haul. When the trip is done no one survives, and that’s okay, because soon enough another bus will come.

So Kara says again her words, and this time she smiles, feeling it, knowing there is, in fact, no problem.

In travel, as in life, as in the reality of existence, you just adjust around them.