ar an mbus go gaillimh

I’d never really thought about the oddities of the 424 until my boyfriend’s car broke down. I love the bus- this bus in particular. I sit in the same seat each time, looking out one window on the way in, across the aisle to the other on the way out. 

God, did Mark hate it. He hated the forty-five–minute journey that stretched into an hour fifteen, the stop-start crawl past Spiddal, where bus stops stopped and road drop-offs began. He couldn’t fathom that we’d walk up to the driver and say just caith anseo mé, and be left happily damp on the side of the road. He didn’t understand the quiet bliss inside the loud chatter: the lads far in the back, the couple returning from drinks in Neachtain’s, the girls still commuting three years into college. 

I didn’t expect him to understand. I laughed to myself the morning after I sent him back again, when he texted me bewildered that the bus had picked up an old woman straight off the road and dropped her a minute later at the post office. She hadn’t even flagged it down. 

The bus keeps moving even when it stops- 

when the doors open and close, when someone gets on soaked through and someone else gets off with a brown Penneys bag split at the bottom. As the road narrows and widens again, I’m thinking about nothing in particular except the familiar sway of it, the distinct landmarks of pothole jolts, and of the way the words around me shorten and soften without announcement, as English and Irish pass back and forth without ceremony, like a fiver pressed into palm, like directions that don’t need to be written down. 

Within the space between Irish and English lies the 424. 

Nach breá í an bhus- muid ábalta dul isteach is amach.
Fágann an ceann deireanach an stáisiún ag ceathrú tar éis a haon déag- tá tú ábalta do dheoch a ól i suaimhneas. 

We’ve grown too comfortable with being forgotten. With choosing between city and identity, switching to English in company and Irish at home. This bus carries us to the shops, to education, to social hour, to a life beyond unpaved roads. 

I look out at the fields of brown and green on the way in- long stretches of nothing but neighbours. I look out into the dark on the way home, at lit rectangles of gaudy curtains. My own reflection catches me sometimes, and I hold it. A moment so ordinary it feels like a memory. A route that’s home.