Tomorrow?

Ayomide Sowore

I go a different way to work today. The bus usually scares me, a lack of seats and peculiar people aren’t a threat on the 9 a.m. train to Westchester, but the bus poses both of those possibilities and many more. 

I wake up early for the bus, so as not to walk all the way to my stop for nothing, but it is raining and I get here early. I hoped that I would find solace from the pouring water when I got here. As I walked through the heavy drops of rain, I imagined what it would feel like wet, but warm sitting on the cold metal bench. Blocked from the rain under the plastic roof that helps to make up the unfinished box which indicates a bus stop. The rain didn’t bother me. 

When I get to the stop, a homeless man is laying on the cold metal bench entrapped in clothes and blankets. I won’t make him move, it wouldn’t be worth it if I did. That plastic roof is cracked from abuse, and does little to protect from the rain. 

So I stand here allowing the drops of rain to hit me over and over again until my white blouse is see-through and my long, flowy black skirt is stuck to my legs. 

My mascara runs and my newly straight hair, reverts to damaged coils. My waterproof lipstick is the only thing that remains intact under the shower of water that comes down from the sky.

The bus is late. 

It pulls up to the stop at 10 a.m., 30 minutes later than it is supposed to. At that point, even my lipstick has dissolved into the pools of water that have fallen on me. 

“Sorry Lady.” The driver laughs looking me up and down as the doors open. “We got stuck in an accident, a car slid from the water and hit into the train to Westchester. We had to wait for a line of cars to reverse and follow the detour.” 

That’s new. In all my days of taking the train, no car had ever put a stop to it. But then again it never rains. 

Is this it?

I take the only open seat on the bus, next to a man in all black snoring weakly despite the black mask blocking his nose and mouth. 

The smile that was washed away by the rain, returns back to my face as I understand the significance of this day’s events. The rain has fallen as it is not supposed to and has caused my usual route to work to fail. 

This is the day, isn’t it? 

I reapply my lipstick and wipe my mascara making myself a blank slate ready to start anew. I take my phone from the side pocket of my backpack, usually intended for bottles, and use the digital mirror. I look fresh like I did when this started.

My mood can not be ruined. Not because the case of my phone retained water, and the paper items usually contained in it are now soggy. Not because the man next to me is now leaning in closer toward me and is bound to end up with his head resting on my shoulder. Maybe if I don’t talk, or complain, or panic, my luck will remain until the end of the day. So I rest my head on the bus seat and prepared to remain frozen for the rest of the ride. 

“Pay up lady.” The sleeping man whispers to me. His head had come to rest on my shoulder, but I ignored his touch in order to keep my luck unchanged. It turns out he was only setting himself up for a covert robbery. 

I ignore the request of the man, his words can’t hurt me, and I keep my head back and my eyes closed. 

I jump then, from the sudden cold. Metal presses against my side and I sigh. 

This isn’t it. I am bound to suffer for longer. 

I turn my head to the man drowned in black, his non-sensible outfit finally making sense to me. I look into his eyes. I want to get to know him since he will be my executioner this time. 

His light blue eyes swim in fear. He is terrified. I am not. 

I hope he is a good gunman. That he knows which nerve or organ will cause the fastest death when shot. I didn’t.

Two months ago on July 18th, 2023, I had gone on the same path as the man sitting next to me and tried to shoot myself. I thought if I handled the death myself, I would be released from the constant loop, the prison, that is my life. 

I knew I wouldn’t be able to enter another day if I died that way, but I was desperate to escape my reality. 

That day, just as the man on the bus had, I stuck a gun to myself and attempted to die and never come back, but unlike the man I had picked a spot on my head, and after the shot, I only ended up with a hole in my throat. 

I lay there on the floor at my home, like the man on the bench today, pleading for a way out, but without a way to scream, the way out didn’t come until four hours later when my neighbor had become concerned from the noise of my flaccid body repeatedly hitting the floor. 

I  lived when the EMTs pulled me out of my apartment, gasping for air but still conscious and breathing. And I lived when they plugged the hole in my throat with a breathing stoma, the thing they used when smokers had gone too far. Then I cried, horribly regretting my decision to end it, knowing that if I woke up the next day in the same hospital bed, I would live my life being seen as someone that I wasn’t, with a hole in my throat, not because I decided to kill myself by smoking, but because I decided to do it with a gun.

Thankfully, an ignorant nurse mixed up saline with a morphine solution stored in a similarly shaped bag, and I died peacefully in my sleep.

Waking up the next day in my bed because of the annoyingly high volume of Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go by Wham!, surrounded by the picture and poster-covered walls of my bedroom, was too much of a contrast from the almost iridescent bare white walls of the hospital room that I dreaded. Relief filled my body at that moment and suddenly I was thankful for the flamboyant song my ex had set as my ringtone right before we had broken up, Before my days started repeating. First figuratively, then literally. 

I had tried to change the infuriating song. It reminded me so much of him, but as each day would reset, I realized that changing it wouldn’t make a difference, since I would wake up to that call every morning no matter what settings I pressed. 

I’ve died every day for 5 months and remained on the day July 18th, 2023.

Five months ago, on July 18th, 2023, was when it first happened. The week before was torturous since I was alone for the first time in my life. 

I spent the week in my bed without a shower, or a snack, only ever eating food that I ordered, brought straight to my door. On Sunday, July 17th, I decided to turn it all around, to get up and get back to work, so I did. 

I was awakened on Monday by a call from a scammer. It sparked hope in me since no one had bothered to call me before that, due to the conditions of the breakup, but the hope died as soon as I saw a non-identifying number float across my phone screen

I got up and dressed, in a long, flowy black skirt topped by a white blouse, my work attire. All traces of my sorrow were gone and my hair was still straight from the dinner I had gone to a week before. Messy, but straight. So I refreshed my hair, applied the waterproof red lipstick, that I had gotten in a goodie bag at a wedding years ago, and went to work on the 9 am train to Westchester. 

I was comforted by the silence of the train. Students and teachers who were a constant on the train, were absent this time, and so were the people who looked old enough to have children and tired enough to be parents. 

School was over, and I recognized that happily.

When I got to work, I used reflection in the elevator doors to gauge which smile would be the most convincing. I chose the 3rd one that I arranged.

I walked into the office with my head held high as people whispered and stared. So my breakup had gone viral. My smile faded but remained as I walked to my place in the office and lowered myself into the cubicle. As soon as my bottom hit the loose spinny chair stationed below my desk, my mouth was set back to a frown. 

No one knew the whole story. 

Instead of working, I went back to the video, somehow captured at the perfect time by an influencer who happened to be sitting next to us when he told me. Those five words snapped me in half. “I don’t want you anymore.”

“Fuck you!” I yelled, looking angry as people said I did all my life. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I slapped the smug smile off of his face. No one remembered the smile since his back was to the camera and all they were really looking at was the tall, angry, black woman beating up her boyfriend. Overreacting, as black women do. The video continued with the sounds of my slaps and screams at the horrible man, and when I pushed him out of his chair I was no longer human anymore, only a monster identified by the tears of the white man, now on the floor. 

Security dragged me out of the restaurant and I was left without dignity. 

The video had 8 million views.

A door slammed open, lifting me out of my stupor and a voice angrily yelled my name. I knew what was coming. So I grabbed the box under my desk and packed my belongings into it. I then walked to the office of the woman who called me and was banished from my job. 

I waited for the train before a dirty-looking man, wearing nothing but worn-out Khakis turned up behind me and told me he recognized me. I told him that “I have one of those faces,” a cliche used by people who don’t want to be recognized, but he remembered where I was from and his face changed from interested to disgusted. 

I was beaten to death before the 5 p.m. train to Closter arrived.

I woke up the time after that, alone in my bed, haunted by what had to be a dream, but I decided not to go to work anyway. I spent the day staring at the empty side of the bed, where the imprint of his body seemed to linger. He was surely laying next to my best friend, or my sister, or any other of the women he had told me about in that restaurant. 

None of them called me to apologize like I had hoped when my phone sang this morning. My father hadn’t called me in years, and my mother was disappointed. She raised me to be strong, poised, and elegant, as I needed to be to survive, and I was anything but at that dinner table.

I was really alone.

So I lay in my bed, like that man on his bench, and stayed home, knowing the risk of going out, but at 4:45 pm that day, a man broke into my apartment and pushed me out of the glass window after seeing a video that revealed my address. 

Homicide.

Traffic Accident. 

Medical errors.

Overdoses. 

Fires.

Drowning. 

Poisoning.

Choking.

But mostly homicide. 

Now I sit in that bus chair and wait to die again, swimming in the blue of my killer’s eyes. But a tear drops from the ocean-looking eye. And more come like the rain that fell on my head this morning. The sun is now out outside, but the clouds loom over the eyes of this man in black. 

I hug him, I understand him. The misery that comes with living in torture is a horrible burden. And as his body touches mine, his gun drops to the side as he cries into my shoulder. 

I make it to work and remain alive. I stand in the parking lot, and smile, without the need of criticism, because this smile is genuine. 

Is this it?

–

Ayomide Sowore is a writer from a small town in New Jersey who is about to enter her Junior year of high school. This summer she attended a pre-college program Columbia University where she developed many pieces. Among singing, reading, and playing soccer, writing is a great passion for her!