Falling in love with strangers on buses

[otherlander]

     After so long under the restless fog of various drugs, I
find myself with no one around to force me to stay medicated.
And so I return to my natural state, no shroud around my mind,
which had previously kept the light from burning me. Now, once
again, as years before, my neurons act like dilated pupils,
letting in the whole sun's fusion, letting in all the damn
human beauty which is pissed on daily, hourly, minutely by the
theives on high, the beauty which broke my fucking heart in
the first place as I watched its infant hair get caught in the
wheels of economies and political ploys, its cranium bloodied
against the iron gears.
     It is strange, now, to feel all of this again, and to
discover, years later, what evokes world-consuming affection
now: A bearded stanger's long-fingered hands wrapped around
the overhead handlebar on a crowded bus, children on their
porch who smile at me as I walk past because they are not yet
old enough to realize that I am a terrible theif, the man who
refills the vending machine with popcorn and Dots stopping to
drink from the water fountain before pushing his cart out of
sight.
     And I wait for the counterpart of this love to arrive,
the re-humanization of what, in my drugged state, appeared to
me (as to most people) as mere facts and figures. I wait for
geography to once again mean nothing, and the most remote
scream to once again sear itself into my consciousness like a
stream of electricity in an unreported concrete cell in the
near East. And if distant crying drives me mad again, it will
all have been worth it.

[InternalDialogue]

1. I love humans.

But it's tough to work at survival at the same time that you try to feel.