My blue is your yellow, but they bleed the same

Sawyer should have more carefully considered the destination of his vacation. This is a beautifully diverse city, but the resultant progressive nature can be retching for someone of his background. He tries to be tolerant, and part of him doesn't understand why the hatred swells, but it's still there, festering, an incurable disease of the soul.

The transit here is wonderful and terrible at the same time. Buses are ubiquitous, running down almost every large street, aside from the more intraversable hills. The schedules can be a bit mish-mash. LED arrival countdowns illuminate some stops with an informative red light, while other stops are little but a bare street corner with a route number stenciled somewhere.

The plastic bus seats are set up to strategically force you into avoiding eye contact with other people. If people didn't keep to themselves so deliberately, this setup might be a very functional social outlet. Instead, there is an impenetrable, yet invisible, wall in front of almost every human face. Most of the humans who attempt to break these walls are, to some degree, mentally ill. Or they're from a place that does things differently. Sawyer quickly realizes that he's from a place that does things differently. Who can say why all these people waste this portion of their lives on iPods, crosswords, and staring off into space at the same passing landmarks they see every working day of their lives?

Despite it lacking in courtesy, Sawyer watches the strangely beautiful, seventeen-year-old lesbian sitting across from him - the one wearing the tattered Muse hoodie and a vintage skeleton key on a worn, neon lanyard around her neck. She made the lanyard in camp nine years ago. The tied key opened every last door in her old childhood home - a home that has not existed for years. It's a nostalgic charm with no practical reason to exist anymore. Her forehead slope is slightly reversed in an oddly intriguing way.

A foreign arm is draped casually around the back of her seat, an inoffensive signal of human intimacy from her companion. This other girl has a curved, red scar on her jawline that she received in a fall during a badminton game in tenth grade, when she lived back in Columbus. She hated the boy who caused the accident for all of three months, until he was killed during a river rafting trip. For no particular purpose, the boy's name is written on a piece of paper that she keeps in her wallet as a memorial.

Sawyer is mentally pawing at his situation the way he would poke at a torn cuticle. Stop upsetting yourself, Sawyer.