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It is 6:35 AM.
It is always 6:35 AM.
Sometimes the world gives the appearance of it being not 6:35 AM--being, for instance, 6:36 AM, or 3:45 post meridiem--but you're wise to its tricks. Any non-6:35 o'clock you see is a ploy to trick you into lowering your guard. You hear a noise in the bushes, you go to investigate, and bam, it's 6:35 AM again.
There's no rest, no respite, there is only 6:35 AM.
Day after day after day.
The proverb says that slow and steady wins the race.
After your late start today it's too late to compete on the strength of your steadiness, but that's no reason to fail with abandon--half credit is better than nothing.
There are two bus stops on Sycamore Street, one at either end, roughly equidistant to your own position.
In Around the World in 80 Days, Phileas Fogg was said to be so exact that he was never in a hurry--although the most deliberate person in the world, he nonetheless always reached his destinations exactly when he intended to.
In the 1993 film Groundhog Day newscaster Phil Connors displays similar powers of unruffled punctuality, but in his case it's due to the time loop he's trapped in.
You've lived this exact day, with minor deviations, five times a week for something like eight years. You missed your shot at the nearer of the two bus stops, but if you point your toes at the other you've an unbeatable lead on the competition.
Frigidly, you shuffle down Sycamore Street. The speed limit is 25 mph and it's too early in the morning for you to be bothered with footracing motor vehicles, so the school bus will gain on and overtake you--but you'll catch up when it stops to admit passengers.
Sycamore Street is cut from the same cloth as Tanglewood Court.
This house has tin cans in the yard.
This house has police cruisers parked outside, and people making loud noises within--you feel a bit boxed in while passing through.
This house is well-maintained.
You shift your binder to your left hand, and hold your right hand to your right-hand ear.
The school bus blows past you like a train without rails, ten tons of steel and moving parts groaning and shrieking in exertion.
You shift the binder back to your right hand.
Your fingers are cold and inflexible.
Your ears feel like solid ice.
You've walking for something like ten minutes.
The bus stops at the end of the street and students swarm it--pitiable wraiths, wreathed in gloom and mist.
Why were you ever worried?
It's because the clock faked you out with made-up numbers like 6:40 and 6:52--to throw you off your game--just to see you scramble and sweat--and you fell for it like a sucker. Probably you could have slept until the display read nine or ten before even setting out and you'd still have caught the bus in this same timeless liminal moment, this ostensible seven oh five o'clock. Any memories you have of having missed the bus on other days--of watching it drive away from you--of running beside it and knocking futilely on the glass door--were probably surgically implanted, false memories to make you sprint and suffer.
You even slow your pace slightly to avoid having to wait in line.
You wait until the stairs are clear before grabbing the banister and clomping up them in one go.
It's warmer inside the bus, but louder. You wouldn't call it an improvement on net.
You pass the bus driver--a little old lady who exudes power and an authority neither of you would ever dare to test--and muse on how in all the books you've read which were written from a first-person perspective, the narrator will interrupt their stream-of-consciousness inner monologue to comment on things which they've seen a thousand times before and have no logical reason to describe to an audience.
(This is something that you think about a lot, in the early morning.)
You could describe entering the school bus's innards--rife with intestinal parasites--as pushing through a solid wall of noise.
But here's a better metaphor: in The World Set Free, H. G. Wells imagines a bomb which, rather than detonating just the once, explodes continuously--with a half-life of seventeen days.
No thin wall to be pushed through, the noise is more solid and real than you are; you're an intangible ghost, incorporeal, coterminous with it.
Or perhaps a gas, theoretically made of atoms but feeble and flexible.
You'll take the shape of your container.
In this respect the human ape is much like Wells's "atomic bombs"--no instantaneous combustible, we.
No, the fire dies by stages.
Your accustomed seat is directly behind the bus driver, and you have it to yourself. (It boggles your mind that no one ever fights you for it; it's the best seat in the house. Right by the exit.)
You'd throw your binder on the bench beside you--lots of people do, to discourage anyone from sitting next to them, while others cram three to a bench, and yes you can disdain the seat-hoarders while being one yourself you contain multitudes--but this was the last stop on the bus route and there's no point. You pin the binder between you and the wall; when all else is equal you like to keep a tight grip on your things.
The door hasn't closed but you're already beginning to thaw--it'll hurt a little at first, like pins and needles, and you know from experience that it'll hurt more in a few moments.
You have what's been termed an "overactive imagination" by people who've wetted their toes in the tidal zone of a vast unfathomed sea... well, wetted their toes or had their toes roughshod wetted, and if the latter is inhuman you've at any rate stopped doing it--these days you pretty much keep to yourself.
In The Hatchet, the main character holds pretend conversations with people he knew. For some reason that always squicked you out a little; you're more comfortable with the Cast Away solution of bleeding all over a volleyball and naming it Wilson. For your own part, you like to pretend that you're being possessed by the ride-along phantoms of historical figures or by characters from fiction or by your alter-ego from the timeline oracles see and tech-geniuses pull their blueprints from. Sometimes you imagine that they can hear your inner monologue too.
How long would it take Thomas Paine, if he dropped in behind your eyes and has been silently lurking there since you woke up, to realize that he was in the future? In America? Would he be proud of it? What would he make of the bus's vandalized faux-leather benches, with their foam innards exposed? Would he be able to place the smell of burnt gasoline that infuses the bus from emergency ceiling exit to the bolts of the undercarriage? Would the deranged madhouse screaming bother him too? Would he know what it is about school buses in particular which inspires people to howl like vulgar baboons? Whence the insipid screaming?
You jam your fingers in your ears.
You rest your head against the window and glower at the street outside--insofar as you can see it past your own reflection.
Your frozen ears feel like they're melting. Like they're turning into water and dribbling down the side of your head. Would you be able to tell if this time they really were? Your fingers don't have much sensation.
Well, you suppose you could check your reflection in the window.
They aren't melting.
It's occurred to you that idly wondering what Thomas Paine would think about one's life as one goes about their day could be a convenient trait in the viewpoint character of a book, to make exposition more natural. You've even toyed with the idea of giving it to a character, though you're by no stretch a writer.
(You're pretty sure that writing things takes capital, and anyway don't publishing agencies reject one hundred and twelve percent of manuscripts?)
Now, the thought continues, the character--on realizing that they have such a useful trait for a viewpoint character--might wonder at its providence. And now it entertains you to question whether, by the same logic, you should wonder about the root cause of it in yourself.
(Obviously this is all sillyness you're generating to entertain yourself--a parrot that gave up on pulling its feathers and retreated into its mind--fictional characters don't have the same rich internal experience that you can directly observe having. (Well, unless, perhaps, they're animated by readers with sufficiently active imaginations...?)
Not to mention that any story in which you played a starring role would be... unreadable, for many reasons. Your life is unrelentingly tedious, and you're unlikeable. Empirically. (And, to rebut the obvious counterpoint apropos Harry Potter, you're not a high-minded hero who only knows Dursleys; you're petty and vicious. You exist in the proximity of group discussions in Language Arts class, and trawl the comments on Line Webtoon; antiheroes--in the original sense of the word--make your age cohort see red.)
And you've never actually read anything using a device like this. To be fair it isn't needed: the standard first-person-limited thing with its acceptable breaks from the word-for-word monologue wherever you need to include the main character's background knowledge (and what they think and feel about it) probably makes for objectively better literature, as long as you can do it unobtrusively; something something art is meant to be truer than life. Don't get the words you're writing in the way of your own story.
And you're not sure that the standard first-person-limited thing is generally supposed to be taken as an internal monologue anyway; something like half of people don't have internal monologues and people still write books about them. And, if you recall correctly, only 60% of internal monologuers use the literary-standard first-person pronoun of "I"--and you aren't one of them. So if you were a viewpoint character, you'd need your raw thoughts edited anyway, if only to match the house style.)
You're looking through a window with the light behind you. If the story of your life is filmed or drawn or animated, the likeliest place to place the camera is right behind your shoulder--where the audience can simultaneously see your expression and whatever it is you're looking at. (Nothing. You aren't looking at anything; the bus isn't moving.)
Being a visual-medium character wouldn't explain your Paineful daydreams, but it doesn't cost you a thing to twist in your seat and wave at the camera.
...And you're suddenly put in mind of how when Howard Dully was a kid he'd daydream audiences who watched him like an actor on the silver screen; his stepmother had him diagnosed a twelve year-old schizophrenic, and lobotomized.
Your superego is an icepick in character if not scope: you stop making weird faces and turn sullenly back to the window.
It's slightly odd that you're not moving yet; you sit taller to see the bus driver, who's apparently looking out through the windshield down a tributary of Sycamore Street.
That one girl who wears a knit-giraffe hat--you share some classes, and her locker is near yours--is running late, sprinting helter-skelter for the bus.
Despite that giraffe-girl is holding up the bus for everyone, you don't have it within you to resent her for it. Life is a series of miserable events which are foisted on you one after another, but school lets out at the same time every day; you're riding out the clock. As yesterday, so tomorrow--giraffe-girl running a little late isn't enough to budge this elephant from its post.
(You do feel momentarily superior to her--because today you were on time--but, small mercies, the moment ends. You resolve to, once you get home, tear out your brain out and replace it with something more useful, like a rock tumbler. You glare at your reflection with longsuffering exasperation and some contempt and some bemused affection. When Ender Wiggins truly understood his enemies, he couldn't but love them--you don't perfectly understand yourself, but you sure are self-centered enough to make up the difference.)
Huffing and puffing and clambering up the stairs onto the bus, giraffe-girl says "sorry, sorry, I'm so sorry," and the bus driver says, "mmhmm," and the doors close and--
--it happens too fast to react, but why didn't you see this coming?--
--the bus starts moving before giraffe-girl has found a seat and she squeaks like a chew toy and grabs the back of your chair to stabilize herself and now it's too late because she says
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