Thirty-one minutes, eleven stops, and I counted the stops, and I have no idea why.
And the thing I was thinking about for most of it was not my husband.
It was the diaper bag.
Because he had taken it out of the boot and put it on the ground. Not handed it to me. Put it down, on the pavement, at my feet, knowing I could not bend.
And it was not cruelty. That is what I could not get past on that bus.
A cruel man hands you the bag and watches you struggle with it. My husband put it down because his hands were full and his mother was waiting, and the physics of a woman five days out of surgery simply did not enter his head as information.
I was not a person he was being unkind to. I was an item that had not been loaded.
