YES AND NO

But because your inner life is not meagre you hear an echo and it is not yours.

You are from out of town. In fact, from out of the country. You have taken a trip to North America and you reach Chicago, Illinois, on a special day. You see flag paper fans and USA balloon banners and star-spangled straws everywhere. After a day of celebrations you end up well-oiled at a dive bar talking to an equally gin-soaked man in his sixties, and you get to sharing. You are enumerating American emblems aloud and off the top of your steaming head comes Yellow school buses! Your new friend looks right back at you somewhat downcast and this time says Yeah, he remembers busing.

Ivory-towered memories lift up inside of you like a rash. But because your inner life is not meagre you hear an echo and it is not yours. You do not budge while the man fiddles with a coaster. You try: What do you mean, busing? Of all the things in your imagination when you were seeing yellow school buses on the television or in the movies, it was teen romance and sunny field-trips galore. He goes on about busing in real life. You create a sense of what this might mean. You want to say sorry, but thankfully, you don’t. You are not your circumstance, but you suspect you have something to do with the present. You are on the receiving end, oddly, of this thing you projected. You tear up. Where is this wanting to go, you wonder. It’s so entangled, you say.

Nice try. Yes and no, he says. You think, for some reason, about morning glories you saw earlier in your trip, when you were in Florida. You sit in that feeling for a minute. You do not mind the pause while you gather all your thoughts and before you speak again you appreciate that he did not treat you like an impostor or a pest, even though today the joke was on you. Folks are buoying up and clapping hands all around you. You are just about to cheering Happy Fourth of July! as a reflect but then you think again, and then you don’t.