egoed eyes

on this day i have decided to make some peace with the transportation system.

it was a dark afternoon, although not actually raining. at first, i set off without a direction in mind, but after seeing some trolejbuses and regular buses with the same wholly seductive dot-matrix letters on them, i could not keep myself from following. these lit letters formed the words "Veliki Mokri Lug [great wet wood]," and the getting there proved more of an ordeal than the stringing together of common adjectives into powerful poetry. already i had been traveling for some time, on and off vehicles, so i ended up having to retrace some of my path to get to a place where i could find a bus heading in my chosen direction. it turned out that many many buses went past said stop, none of them the one i wanted. during the interval spent stamping my feet, exhaling with puffs of steam, and other horse-like activities with which i passed the time, it became apparent that i was waiting for a certain #20 bus and, moreover, noticed by one individual in particular: a German-looking old man. prior to all this, i'd seen him implicated in a weird momentary scene, involving a young girl, who caught his eye and stuck out her tongue at him. the entire thing lasted at most one second, and i'm sure no one else saw it. anyway, this old man was waiting for the #20 as well and, thus, we became bound together in the camaraderie of those who haplessly wait. when the #20 was seen in the distance, he took it upon himself to tell me (i could understand every word! this, by the by, happens a lot. when the words are small ("ako [if]" and "ovo [it]") and the sentences are short)) that, yes, the bus was arriving. alas, in not consulting my map and having not even the memory of sun to guide my directional thinking, i had been waiting on the wrong side of the road, such that although this *was* my bus, it was going the opposite direction from Veliki Mokri Lug.

now the dilemma had suddenly grown several additional branches. or, rather, two. i felt, on one hand, compelled to board the bus for which i had ostensibly been waiting. secondly, i had to stay on said bus for some reasonable length of time so that i would not dash the fragile connection with this man (who, by all appearances, placed so much value on it) by revealing that it had, all of it, been a mistake. i concluded that by staying in the back of the bus, while he was positioned in the front, i could quickly exit and amend my ways without the old man noticing. however, he found a rail by the driver, standing backwards and, as such, could view the entire contents of the bus. he remained in this spot and my salvation seemed unlikely. however, as chance would have it, though i'll never know if it was due to passing whim or something more concrete, he finally moved towards an open seat and, in doing so, turned his back upon me. by this time we had covered some distance, so when, at long last, i hopped off the bus, it was the early night that besets those who are too far east (but not enough west) and i was very much out of my way. moving quickly and surreptitiously, i made my way across the road. without going into the details, it was a similarly long wait for the #20 in the other/correct direction, but i was careful to make no friends of the eye-contact sort.

Veliki Mokri Lug is even more complex a description than originally commanded my undying affection, as it seems devoid of trees (though i cannot say this for certain, since it was dark upon arrival at the end of the line). winking lights of city and surroundings stretched all around, all below—as getting there required an exhilarating climb up some very narrow roads, with a multi-point turn in an impossibly small patch of cement for the getting back.