Town

In this town, I understood only two languages. That’s why when people spoke the third language, which was the most popular because it was the national one, I didn’t understand anything at all.

In the evenings when local buses were crawling with people, you could sometimes hear what they were saying to each other: to their workmates, colleagues, friends, relatives or just random people, who happened to get on this exact bus at this time. People sometimes talked quieter, sometimes louder. For the most part, everybody tried not to make too much noise, but instead quietly told the person they are conversing with and no one else their burning story about what had happened to them during the day. Sometimes that happened to be stories, whilst other times they shared some memories which had perhaps come to their weary minds by accident. If those interlocutors had known each other better, their conversations may have slowly become more active, energetic and even more trustworthy. For some, they had told the complete truth, but perhaps some still decided on lying. Who knew what they were actually thinking…

It continued like this every evening. Every evening, when you use public transport, it is the same. You could go on a city train, tram or switch over to a bus, but generally, it didn’t change anything. Yes, the route changed, the people changed and stories were different, but it stayed the same. You breathed a sigh of relief in a barely noticeable way. It was a little difficult to move slowly forwards along the aisle to the exit near the bus driver. These people were unlikely to know that I understood what they were talking about. They used to think that the two languages spoken here could not be understood by majority of foreigners. It was here where they considered me a foreigner too. There were times when their dull, moody faces looked out of the windows with some cold disengagement, as if their thoughts were not here, but somewhere else far, far away.

I looked around several times, but no. There were no familiar faces. Staring at my reflection in a window pane, I saw my sad facial expression. The same facial expression the people next to me had. Yes, here it was difficult. And this difficulty wasn’t expressed by something particular, but rather you found it in the details. In such small events that relentlessly took place around you day by day. And so to the next weekends, then weeks, then months. Waves of frustration, misunderstandings and then silence.

When I got especially bored and tired of catching the fragments that were coming from the crowd, and in some desire to find silence, I put on my headphones and I secretly dreamt about the sea. Music started to play slowly from the MP3 player. The melody tended to fill the mind and stopped you thinking about yours and everyone else’s misconceptions around you. What were they talking about? About work. Job, money, town, the weather… These topics were everywhere. Many of the issues that were raised worried me too, because and I was a part of this stuffy society with such a simple name like ‘town’.   


My blog: www.stacyshystovska.blogspot.com