On the bus a seventy-year-old woman sat next to me. I was reading the Qur'an. She made small talk and I obliged: destination, weather, relatives, Christmas. Stranger talk. I was sorely tempted to open up to this stranger, to tell her everything that had happened lately. So I did. It didn't really make me feel better.
Words eventually bled into the situation in the Middle East, then religion. I soon discovered that I was sitting beside a road-weary missionary from the Society for Promoting the New Testament to Perfect Strangers. Out of her cavernous purse came a trinity of little pamphlets promising simple salvation to the reader.
"... because the Bible says so."
"That's what you believe, and it's fine for you, but..."
"... no, it's in the Bible. It's God's own word. It's true."
She went on to tell me that the problem with "my generation" is that we are too educated. We're slipping away from morality, from the Bible and from God. She said that we were reading too many books by non-Christians, and that these books were damning us all to hell.
I waited a bit, then smiled at the 18- or 19-year old girl sitting across the aisle from me. She had a huge box on her lap, wrapped in a green trash bag. I dug into my bag, pulled out a book, and handed it to her. Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre.
"Can I read this?"
"You must read this."
Riding that bus made me feel like a real transient, slipping through a handful of unrelated lives; trying to extract some meaning, leave some mark, or at worst keep myself amused.