East on Bellaire, North to UHD

You catch the bus on Bellaire while Sharpstown still rubs sleep from its eyes. Plastic seats cold, floor salted with yesterday’s grit. The driver nods, the door sighs shut, and the city begins to scroll: panaderías bright as small suns, signs in two languages promising the same thing—fix, repair, begin again.

Morning builds from gray to nickel. Inside the bus, everyone keeps their weather to themselves. A student with an orange backpack mouths formulas to the window. A woman counts bills, counts breaths, counts the stops to her second job. You ride east and try not to count anything.

You tell yourself this is progress: a ride, then another ride, then the station by the bayou and the campus tucked under the skyline like a question with good posture. You imagine walking into a classroom smelling of dry erase and somebody else’s hopes. You imagine the version of you who belongs there without rehearsing.

The bus hisses at corners you could name blindfolded. Pho steam pushes out of a door and fogs the glass; for a block the world smells like winter medicine. Two kids argue about which superhero would take the bus. The answer is obvious: the one who knows saving the city is mostly about showing up.

At Hillcroft a man boards with sun in his hair and sits with the care of someone who’s been broken and taped back together. At Renwick you almost stand, a muscle memory from another year. You stay seated. The past waves from the curb like an aunt you can’t afford to hug.

The skyline rises by inches, casual, as if it didn’t mean to. You think about the future the way you’ve started to think about difficult people: let it have its moods. Let it ignore you. Your job is to keep moving until it trips over your name.

Transfer. Different wheels, a different rhythm. You cross a seam in the city where the bayou threads itself under bridges that learned patience from floods. The campus appears the way truth does—less dramatic than you hoped, sturdier than you feared. You pull the cord and the bell answers, small and certain.

Outside, the air tastes like metal and new paper. A gull laughs where no ocean is. You shoulder your bag and rehearse no speeches. Today is just a desk, a syllabus, a pen that doesn’t skip. The future may not wonder about you. That’s fine. Wonder is your job. You carry enough for two.

You walk toward doors that open without judging your timing. Somewhere behind you the bus exhales and leaves, already forgetting your face. You forgive it. You’re here to remember yourself.