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TÂM ANMỖI NGÀY

The road home

Tâm An mỗi ngày2 min read
A hand resting on the frame of a bus window, with a softly blurred late-afternoon street and warm roadside lights beyond the glass

Thursday evening, the bus stuck at the tamarind crossing. I sat by the window with my backpack hugged to my chest, and realised I hadn't looked outside once all week. The bus had taken this road for over a year. I only remembered it as a gap between work and home, usually filled with a phone screen.

The poem below was written while I was a passenger, sitting still, eyes open, looking out through the glass. One thing before you read: it is for the person in the back seat, not the person at the handlebars. If you ride yourself on the way home, your eyes, ears and hands belong to the road, and this poem can wait until you have stopped, switched off the engine and are standing somewhere safe.

The bus inches through the crossing,
the tamarind tree at the alley mouth
stands where it always stands.
I sit by the window,
eyes open.

The broken-rice stall switches its lamp on first,
smoke rising past the tin roof.
A smell of fried scallion oil
slips in through the gap in the glass.

The lottery-ticket woman walks her bike across.
Ten seconds
no one honks,
no one hurries.

A long day
has fallen somewhere
between this stop and the next.
I don't go back to pick it up.

The road home
is no shorter than yesterday.
It's only that today
I am inside it.

The door folds open.
I step down
at the right stop.

An older woman beside me leaned over and asked:

"Where are you getting off?"

"The stop after the petrol station."

"Terrible jam, isn't it."

"Yes. A jam."

I had said "terrible jam" more times than I could count, and every time it was a complaint. That evening it was just a sentence. I saw the back of a red truck ahead, and a sparrow landing on the traffic light box, tilting its head at the stream of bikes as if counting.

The road home is usually the part struck out of the day. Eight hours at work have names and tasks. The evening has rice, television, someone waiting. The part in between belongs to nobody, so I fill it with my phone, the way you fill a hole. I used to think it was because I was tired. Now I think it is something else: it is the only place in the day where nobody asks me to do anything, and I am not used to being in a place like that.

Some days I looked so much that I missed my stop, had to get off at the next one and walk two hundred metres back among frogs calling after the rain. I don't count those days as failures.

Practice · 3 min

Three things outside the window

  1. 1.Only do this as a passenger sitting still, never as the driver or while crossing a road
  2. 2.Eyes open, look out of the window for one stretch of the road
  3. 3.Find one thing with a colour, one thing in motion, and one thing you can hear or smell
  4. 4.Don't name it, don't grade it, just look until the bus moves on
  5. 5.At your stop, step down and notice your first two footsteps on the ground

This article was created with AI assistance.

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