“Why am I?”

Sometimes  you do not have to read Camus or Sartre to know the absurd, you just need to feel lost in a busy, crowded bus station.

My ‘essence’ since infancy was to be in the middle of a noisy scene with no intention to be part of it. However, life kind has blessed me with friends who can stand all my absurd ways.

One such friend was D…. who just knew I could be in essence, a disaster when it came to public means of transport. We stood together, a third person, her and me. And I could sense D’s apprehension as she watched me grow “aesthetical” of my surroundings. I felt excitement seeing the way people hung like sardines and what struck me was every bus in that little town had just one exit door. She alerted  me that we would have fewer buses and I better learn to squish into a bus than ponder ‘ethics’. 

And just after we missed a possible first bus because of my refusal to squish through human fused groups, D… decided to teach me to board a one door bus. She said, “You stay close to us and just follow us into the bus”.

The second bus neared and in the hustle of a collective, I stood transfixed “Being-in-the-Midst” as I lost track of my friends’ trail. Then I exercised my sense of abandonment I saw a passenger give a kind rustic smile and he gestured for the bags I held. He offered he would get them across. So I passed the bags through the window certain that I was doing the right thing. And just as I handed over the last of the luggage, I felt the shadow of my friends right beside me. D…clenched her jaws as I volunteered to get inside the bus. She hissed through her angst at my ‘self’, “you don’t have to anymore, we have stepped outside.”

Then she watched me with ‘anguish’ as unknown strangers passed my bags from the front to the rear end of the bus and she glared at me further as I smiled back a smile of gratitude at the rustic ‘authentic’ stranger who had given me the worldly design.

D and the other friend finally decided that all I was obligated to was to carry all the bags to the extreme end of the bus station and wait till they manage to find a space in the second last bus of that evening. So I picked up the bags and waited with a sense of ‘essence’, of being in charge of one aspect of a fleeting reality.

It was then a burly, stock faced police man, strode to me and told me to follow him to the control room. And in ‘bad faith’, I followed and reached a cloistered legal space.

There were six of his breed and one of them asked me pointing to a bag that looked familiar yet unfamiliar, “Is that yours?”

I felt existential vacuum creep in as I declared, “ No”.

Then they looked at the man with the rustic smile and asked, “ Are you sure it is her?”

The rustic smile smiled at me before nodding vigorously at burly eyes.

Then the unfamiliar looked familiar and I recognized it as D’s bag which I was obligated to guard.

But caught in existential vacuum I declared, “The bag is mine”

The eyes of law which eschewed abstraction was quick, “Then why did you say it is not yours”

 I realized I was being questioned of my identity, as another growled, “If it is yours then what is inside the bag”

That was the moment I realized ‘Being in nothingness’. I knew what could make D laugh or cry, I did not know what she had packed inside a black leathered bag.

I felt ‘nausea’ sift through me as I repeated, “The bag is not mine”

Just as they almost gave up hope and perhaps decided to make my identity as a terrorist, D and the other friend walked in and the explanation that followed helped me revoke what perhaps would have been a concrete reality of a  prison.

And perhaps to avoid despair, the control room took upon itself the task of seeing us off in the last and final bus of the day.

And in ‘badfaith’ I declared to ‘D’, “But I followed orders, Mauvaise Foi!”

As the rickety bus rattled away, ‘D’ set my logotherapy rolling with a single statement “It is alright”, a statement she always used to the absurd in me.