For the first two years I worked at the clinic I didn’t have a car, my old one died the same month I moved to Vermont for the job and I never got around to replacing it right away, so I took the bus, twenty five minutes each way with one transfer if the timing didn’t line up right. I read more books during those two years than I have in any stretch since, which is a fact I bring up sometimes like it’s a point of pride and sometimes like it’s an accusation against my current, more comfortable life.

There was something about the bus specifically, not just having reading time but having reading time with a hard, external limit on it, a stop coming whether I was ready or not, that made we more efficient with attention than I am now with a whole evening theoretically available. I finished books in that window that I’ve since started and stalled on with a car in the driveway and a full night ahead of me and somehow less actual reading getting done. I got Chaos most of the way through on that bus, actually, the copy with the bent corner, from a bag I carried it in for months.

I don’t romanticize the actual logistics of it, standing at a stop in real Vermont cold waiting for a bus that was sometimes fifteen minutes late, that part I don’t miss even a little. But I’ve never fully replaced whatever discipline that forced limit gave me, and forty minutes before bed with the phone in the kitchen is the closest I’ve gotten to rebuilding it on purpose instead of by accident. I got a car eventually, obviously, the winters here made it close to necessary. I sometimes wonder what I’ve quietly lost since, having all the time in the world and somehow using less of it.

The route had one transfer downtown, a ten minute wait most mornings at a stop next to a coffee place that opened early enough for me to duck in if the timing lined up right, and I got to know the same handful of regulars riding at that hour, a guy with a toolbox who always sat near the front, an older woman who read actual newspapers folded into quarters. Nobody talked much, which suited me, twenty five minutes felt exactly long enough to read and not so long that I’d start feeling obligated to make conversation with strangers I saw four days a week and never learned the names of.

I remember specific books more by which bus I was riding than by the year I read them, which is a strange way to file a memory but it’s the one I’ve got. Foundation was an afternoon bus home, the light already going in winter, standing room only some days so I read holding a pole with one hand and the book in the other, which is its own kind of skill you don’t appreciate until you’ve lost the need for it. I got looked at more than once for laughing out loud at something on a crowded bus, which I’ve never quite figured out how to do quietly.

When I finally bought a car it felt like relief for about two weeks and then like something closer to loss, a specific kind of loss I didn’t expect and couldn’t really explain to anyone at the time. Priya thinks I’m being nostalgic about something that was actually just inconvenient, standing in the cold, bad transfers, a schedule that wasn’t mine. She’s not wrong about any of that. I still haven’t found anything since that replicates the particular kind of reading that only happens when there’s a stop coming and nothing you can do about it.