Greetings from a Fellow Traveler

Hello. Listen. I want to tell you something. Nothing big; don’t get excited. I am not going to tell you the location of the bodies of those two college girls that have been missing since last July. And don’t think I had anything to do with that either. I’m just saying. Anyway, I have it on reasonably good authority that nothing bad has happened to them at all—that they just wanted to get away on there own. A friend of mine knows a friend of theirs. I only mention them because they happen to be in all the papers lately. Mostly, I think, because they are pretty. It is like that with the pretty and missing. I wonder how many homely people have been lost in the meantime.

Anyway, the small thing I wanted to tell you: we are in this together. What? you ask. I assume you ask. Why wouldn’t you? And I mean only this: all of this. Everything. The world, the universe, existence and all that. We are in it together, you and I.

It is like, I think, riding a bus. Getting on a bus. A crowded bus. You are not even sure it is the correct bus. You get on, find a seat where you can—by the window, by the aisle—try to find a spot to yourself at first, though you know that even if you do someone will come along and sit next to you anyway. And who will that person be? That is the question. Will they smell funny or want to talk? If they have candy in their pocket will they offer you some? Are they the sort that will fall asleep with there head against your shoulder or the type that will elbow you in the ribs for possession of the armrest? It is all fairly random. We get what we get.

So I am that person sitting next to you. That is all that I wanted to say. We are in this together. We are jostled along bumpy roads while the bus takes its slow and regular route around the sun. Here is our mutual armrest. Would you like to use it first? Are you sleepy? I am here. My shoulder is here. Hello.