Amelia was a superstitious person. Her comfort level rose as her habits became more engrained into her daily life. While in high school, her day was seemingly compartmentalized and organized with an utmost, complete lack of temerity or spontaneity. She woke up every morning at 5:30 AM with her stereo blaring the song, "There's Always Someone Cooler than You," by Ben Folds. And the song was fitting and uplifiting in that ironic sort of way that fit Amelia to a tee and that never failed to bring a smile to her face -- like clockwork. Amelia would walk over to her "Far Side Day-to-Day Calendar," and tear one day off, discarding it forever in the trashcan and effectively removing all the concerns and worries from the past day along with it -- a ritualistic cleansing of the soul. She would go downstairs, sit on the large couch in the living room and turn the big-screen television onto MTV. Her breakfast consisted of one Toaster Strudel breakfast pastry with icing and a glass of orange juice. At exactly 5:55 every morning she would start running the water for her shower. She would wake up her father at about 6:30, giving him about 15 minutes to wake-up and drive her to the bus stop, which was located in the mall parking lot. There they would listen to the radio until the bus would arrive and take her away for another day of school.
These innocuous idiosyncracies though became much more significant as the date approached for her to leave home for the University of O. and begin her freshman year of college. The very neat correspondence between her academic day and her morning routine suddenly registered in Amelia's head, and she worried that maybe there was more to her seeming luck and successes than met the eye. As that last summer wore on and quickened toward her imminent departure, the smells of the morning bus ride became real to her and she carried it with her through the day, always thinking about it and focusing on it. When night came around, she would plop herself down in the front of the television and concentrate on the morning bus rides that she would never have again once she was at the University of O. She would sit and think about it until falling asleep, not even aware of what she had been watching. Her parents would come down the next morning and see her positioned strangely, not even making the connection that she looked like a sleeping bus-rider. They would ask her about it, but Amelia would just shrug it off and say that she must have been exhausted from a rough day of working at the fast food place down the street.
Amelia never realized before that summer that her best sleep came while on the bus. She didn't know if it was the smells that she experienced during the bus ride every morning, but she reasoned that this must have been the case because it was strong in her memory. Amelia was puzzled by this because the smell was what she hated the most when she first started riding the municipal buses every morning. At first she had trouble pigeonholing the smell, but it soon became identified with urban decay and decrepitude, of poverty and sickness, and of hard-times and exhaustion. Oftentimes, in the morning, she would sit on the bus while listening to her favorite CD for that month and think about exhaust, waste, and the abject tiredness that seemed to surround her on the faces of those sitting on the bus and on the building facades that lined the well-worn path to school.
One morning during that last summer, she woke up early and walked herself out to the bus stop in the mall parking lot. She got on the bus and quickly realized that this was nothing like as she remembered it. Sitting on the bus and thinking about her disappointment and misplaced expectation, she soon realized that the weather was too warm and the sun too bright. A proper morning bus ride was cold and filled with grey skies, dreary thoughts, and the occassional nap to escape all the tiredness that surrounded her.
Her motivation, the secret to her success, what turned her onto academics in the first place all those years ago was the fear that the smell would catch up to her and consume her whole. Life in the city was hard, and she saw its affects every morning. The city's hardness lived in that smell. Her early morning routine was merely to steel herself against its effects.
Her classmates were wrong to joke that she was blowing members of the faculty. Sometimes there are forces at work that are greater than the sum of your worth.
...Some More
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