Leaving Aracaju
by pugflavoredsub
We are leaving Aracaju, and the only things that wave us goodbye on the long bus ride back home are the hills — as solitary as they are endless, dotted here and there by little white shacks with little tiled roofs. Less like homes and more like lost cattle or ghosts under the moonlight. Along certain stretches of the highway, the brush growing up and down the hills becomes so dense, dry, and dark that the horizon disintegrates into the sky. The only thing that reminds you that there is a world outside inky nothingness and your heartbeat is the occasional passing car or dim rest stop. If you manage to catch a star poking through the night, it feels like a miracle.
I crack my window open and lean my cheek against the glass, the breeze blasting through the cracks between my teeth. I might be the only person awake on the entire bus, and this pleases me; even the bus driver seems to have drifted off, so rarely and so gently does he steer the wheel; The only thing that reminds you that you’re not on a bus filled with dead people is the music — the tinny forró coming from the radio, the misplaced soda bottles rolling on the floor, the lip smacking and shallow breathing of the other passengers.
I guess it’s a terrifying image — sitting on a bus to nowhere, passing by multitudes of nothing, with no one around to acknowledge that you exist. But I’m oddly happy that if the end of the world is anywhere, it’s here.
The bus turns sharply to the right — enough to knock someone into consciousness for a split second, enough to whack a dry cough out of someone’s chest, enough for the bus driver to squeak against the Naugahyde seat; it’s enough that the sky shifts in front of my eyes and suddenly fills with milky pinholes. Stars.
– miracles. Multitudes of miracles.
In little Sergipe.
Songs to dream to.
