This is a guest post by Anupa Mistry

I always listen to guitars during my morning commute and breathy female singers on the way home; aggressive music to wake me up, quiet voices to wind down. Only, the past few days I haven’t been listening at all thanks to an intrusive, relentless narrative inside my head. I can’t turn it off and I can’t overpower it, so catch me in the back corner of the bus, head resting on cold glass, ghostly streaks appearing and disappearing with every breath, staring, glazed, into the blank air in front of me. Like most commuters, I’m conscious enough—aside from peripheral vision clocking familiar sights until my stop—to intentionally avoid eye contact with other patrons.

Today, trying to eliminate my thoughts, I grip a pen over a sheet of paper. No reception, no ring tones, nobody blowing up my BBM—without 2010 distractions I become trapped in between the lines, I escape. Pages of imbalanced and scrawled letters, detailing thoughts, ideas, and confessions go by. Head still posted up against the icy glass, I take a break and make non-committal eye contact for a second of human contact on this impersonal, shitty commute. It’s a baby the colour of a latte, grin brimming with drool while squeezing the fingers of his young, blonde, kinda chubby mom.

Distracted by voices, I shift to the older man in the orange turban, nodding gravely while his burgundy-turban’d companion talks a lot, mostly with his hands, touching his forehead painfully and rolling his eyes to a gummy, grubby, graffiti’d heaven. “Those kids/this country/my fucking back!” I suppose he’s saying.

There’s a dude sitting exactly diagonal from me, writing something too. For the smooth, composed way my black, nearly dry ink slips across the page (jagged only when the streetcar hits bumps), his font is the complete opposite; the letters tall, wide, rakish. Like 10-year-old boys stepping up from carefully practiced printing to cursive, but also stressed and cramped like those too old and hasty to care.

He looks like a Columbine Boy and that’s probably not a very nice thing to say. By that I mean he’s wearing a trench coat and other ill-fitting clothes—all black everything—with dull, greasy, uncombed hair and a kinda salty look on his face, like don’t fuck with me. He’s what I (we?) would’ve made fun of back in high school and still mentally judge today. He plays magic cards probably. His hands are pudgy and boyish from growing up in front of a computer instead of playing basketball and picking fights.

Columbine Boy is writing a story with his preteen print into a worn pink Duo-Tang. From upside down and diagonal, I see the words “The Stone of Initiation,” and my suspicions are confirmed—total magic card shit, right? But I’m intrigued so I make no attempt to hide my curiosity and crane my neck to read some more. He notices, screwfaces, and turns away, continuing to write like a fever.

Really though, I’m intrigued because he has a prominent brow bone hanging over piercing Clearwater eyes. When he writes he looks brooding and bites the bottom left corner of a slightly feminine smile. He could stand to gain some weight and acquaint himself with a bottle of Head & Shoulders (pardon) but he’s got a day’s growth, long lashes and a well-defined jaw, Columbine Boy does. He could be someone else, I think, but he already is: my distraction.

Anupa Mistry is an editor at the Ashcan, contributor to Exclaim, and a cover song connoisseur. She also has a day job.