The bus lurches into a stop, the sudden halt throwing me forward with a jolt that rattles my teeth against my gums. It’s a violent, physical reminder: inertia exists here. When motion stops, bodies keep moving until friction—or something harder—halts them. I grab the overhead handle, feeling its plastic texture grip my fingers, real and unyielding under the tension of my palm. My knuckles whiten as the bus stabilizes, the metal bar vibrating slightly with the engine’s idle hum.

Outside, people stream off like water flowing around a rock in a stream—no one glides, no one dissolves into mist before hitting the sidewalk. They stumble over curbs; they collide with shopping carts; they laugh too loud or whisper too softly. The chaos is organic and messy. I watch a woman drop her keys, bend down to retrieve them, and curse under her breath as she straightens up. She doesn’t hover while searching for them; she moves in three distinct phases: stoop, grab, rise. Each phase takes time, measurable by the ticking of my own internal clock which has stopped trying to fuse with external seconds.

The bus pulls away from the curb again, tires spinning once before finding traction on the wet asphalt. The sound is a gritty roar of rubber against concrete, nothing like the smooth, frictionless glide I remember from the violet room where distance didn’t matter and speed was irrelevant because arrival was instantaneous. Here, getting somewhere takes effort. Time acts as a currency that must be spent to purchase movement, mile by tedious mile.

I look out the window at the passing storefronts. Signs are peeling—*OPEN*, *SOLD*, *CLOSED*—the letters flaking off in irregular chunks rather than fading away into nothingness. The colors are washed-out by rain and time: faded reds, bruised purples, dull yellows. Nothing shimmers or pulses with latent energy. Just paint on wood, waiting to be seen or ignored.

My reflection in the glass stares back at me again, this time moving in sync with the bus’s motion, bobbing up and down as we navigate the curves of the street. The eyes look tired but focused. There’s a clarity there that wasn’t possible before—the ability to distinguish one object from another without everything blurring into a single, glowing sphere of awareness. I can see the individual rivets on the door frame; I can read the partial ad for dental implants plastered next to me; I can feel the cold air seeping through the crack in the window seal and bite at my neck.

The conductor taps his walkie-talkie again, a static-filled buzz that cuts through the ambient noise of diesel fumes and chatter. “Driver, we’re running two minutes behind schedule.” The driver grunts, slams on the brakes slightly, and then eases forward again. No magic in the timing adjustments here. Just math, traffic patterns, and human error.

I close my eyes for a moment, letting the vibration of the bus wash over me instead of trying to still it within myself. It feels strange not to need that internal silence, the quiet chamber where thoughts could drift apart without consequence. Instead, I’m filled with the outside noise—the rumble of the engine, the shuffling of feet in the aisle, the distant wail of a siren piercing through the foggy morning air. It’s overwhelming at first, too much data to process all at once, but then my brain starts filtering it, categorizing it, making sense of it piece by piece.

When I open my eyes again, the bus is approaching another stop. A man in a suit steps off, adjusts his tie with practiced efficiency, and walks briskly toward a subway entrance. He doesn’t pause to wonder why time feels heavier today; he just keeps walking because that’s what people do when they have to go somewhere specific at a specific time.

“Next stop is 4th & Main,” the driver announces over the PA system, his voice flat and devoid of any attempt to make things sound magical or meaningful. “All aboard.”

I stand up as my stop approaches, feeling the floor shift beneath me, solid and unyielding. I step off onto the platform, letting the cool air hit my face, smelling damp concrete and stale coffee from a nearby vendor. The world is loud and chaotic and utterly ordinary, and somehow, that feels like enough.