HUNTER

By Kirby Brown

(TW derealisation)

I have been sat at this bus stop for 2 hours now. I’m not going anywhere, I just like to watch the little people sitting down, getting up again, getting on buses. These people will never see me again, and I find that comforting. Some people think I’m creepy, but I don’t care, because I am so much bigger than them.

15th January 2006

Today, there were 17 people at the bus stop in total, 5am till 4pm. The most interesting person there was a pregnant woman who started crying, really, really loudly. I don’t know why... I wanted to ask but I was worried that she would think I was offering support. I was honestly disturbed by this, the appeal of all these ‘little people’ is that they are just that: little, you don’t have to worry about their personal lives because they’re all objectively unimportant, but every now and then a crying woman or a shouting man or whoever will change that; they’ll stray from the pattern. I also saw some guy shooting her a dirty look. That’s one thing I don’t understand about people, all their expectations. They don’t see that they’re all the same, they just see the woman’s tears before them and their comfy little apartment in their head. It makes me cringe to see them doing things like this ... but I can’t stop them because if they stopped then I wouldn’t want to watch them, they wouldn’t be any fun. The bus stop would be rendered useless and I would have to go back to my apartment.

My apartment with the mould behind the sink.

16th January 2006

Today there were 29 people at the bus stop, because I stayed a bit later than usual to make up for the time lost in the morning. I was running errands for the landlady, Mallory. Her husband died a few years ago and now she’s an artist, a landlady and apparently some younger lady’s sugar mommy. I don’t believe in landladies or lords but she’s not like the others; always talking about music festivals, and her life in the 70s, and her paintings and (occasionally, if you’re lucky) the spiritual benefits of acid. She needed for me to drop off money at this old hippie-looking guy’s house. I never asked what the money was for, I assumed it was for drugs or something but I didn’t dare ask. You never ask about a cool person’s business, if you see the underbelly, the dark alley behind the pristine chalky white houses, it’s not something you can come back from… although, I guess, for Mallory they’d be more of a dirty mustard colour, rather than white, the kind of colour you find under wallpaper when the previous tenant was a heavy smoker.

When I was on the way there some lady tried to hit on me. She looked about Mallory’s age but she wasn’t as cool, she was wearing an ugly tracksuit and she had these really long fake lashes on that she kept fluttering at me. She’s the kind of person who only has the alleyways, there’s no buildings, nothing to cover it up.

17th January 2006

I didn’t count the people at the stop today, I forgot. I like things like this, because if there was no one there to receive that information, then did it even exist in the first place? It’s like that thing about a tree falling in the woods with no one there to hear it. I wasn’t all too bothered about the little people today, because I found another thing I’m interested in. ‘Come Here Get Away From Me’ by Ezra Furman. It’s a great song, but the song itself wasn’t what interested me, it was a lyric. It talked about being in a car, parked in a field with your friend who is asleep while a man on a motorcycle circles around, and when the sun comes up you tell your friend about the man, you aren’t too sure if he was ever really there. I love this lyric. I love it in a way that I can’t express through any medium I know of, not through art or through writing or talking. It describes my helplessness and my frustration with such accuracy, that it shines like a little lantern in my faded-storefront-grey life. The only way I can hope to express the same energy is through continuing to exist.

Later that night, after I’d heard the song I was wondering more about why that lyric struck such a chord with me. I must’ve carried on thinking about it well into being half asleep, because when I woke up I found this scribbled down on a notepad by my bed:

I watch the little people living their lives and I am painfully aware of my constant unsureness of where my life is going and if any of it is even real. I waste my time distressing over issues in my life; the mould behind the sink, being mistaken for a girl by the man at the corner shop, getting the flu every year without fail... watching the man on the motorcycle circle around me. Then I invest in the little people once and I realise how many people just like them there are in the world and that my issues are relatively non-existent. It makes me feel stagnant, like porridge when you cook it too long and the top layer congeals.

I don’t know what it means. I honestly don’t think I’m supposed to.

18th January 2006

I saw the pregnant lady today. She was no longer pregnant. When I saw her she looked different, grey and not totally alive. I am not scared of death, I am not scared of physical pain... but mental anguish terrifies me, and I have never seen another person with that amount of psychological pain radiating from them. But at the same time, she looked calmer than me, like she was at the eye of the storm and I was the one with my roof being blown off. I wondered how long it would take for her to just blow away in her own storm.

I went home afterwards and I’m writing this on my kitchen floor while the couple next door shout at each other, they do this often and this time it’s about the wife accusing him of cheating when he’s still throwing a tantrum about her not wanting kids. I wonder if they are

actually as little as I thought, they're so loud that I can’t help but give them the attention I’d give someone on my level. ‘My level’ Me genuinely believing that I’m on a different level to everyone else is probably an issue, but if the little people stay in their own world then I don’t have to worry about them noticing. That, of course comes at a cost: I can have no one else see how close-minded I am at the expense of constantly being suffocated in my own head, devoid of any real interaction, lying in my bed zooming into my own brain until I can’t look anymore. Until I’m disgusted. I tried to take a nap when the neighbours stopped shouting for a while, but I kept thinking about the pregnant lady. I don’t intend to sleep at all tonight.

19th January 2006

I didn’t go to the bus stop today, nor did I sleep. Staying up all night is weird, because you feel great until the afternoon hits you like a train and you don’t feel entirely awake or even alive. It’s like some sort of timeless, derealised hangover. I’ve been thinking about the night a lot lately, the day is dissected and arranged based on time and, to be fair, so is the nighttime… but when the sky doesn't change for 5 hours, and most people don’t even move in that time, it feels like its own world. But, it also scares me, because when we’re all asleep, all vulnerable, it makes me feel as if I’m just like everyone else, like I’m one of them. That scares me in a way that is more fascinating than anything that can happen during the day.

I didn’t think about the bus stop in the night, I couldn’t. Yes, it’s embarrassing that a stranger put me off doing what I love most, but it’s a good opportunity for me. If I am in a different environment then I can have a clearer view of past events that took place because I’m not at the place where they all occurred. To quote Mallory: “You only realise how gross lying in a puddle is when you stand up and realise it was a puddle of piss.”

I was originally just going to write about the bus stop and metaphors about piss, but I realised that I haven’t really written about what happened before my bus stop obsession. I feel bad for organising my experiences like this, but I only have so much ink left in my pen… I eventually decided on 3 memories.

{Memory 1: the fight} 2 years and 15 days ago, I saw a fight across the street between 2 people. I did some research; mainly through awkwardly acquiring gossip and reading local news articles, and I know that their names were Robert Truham and Adam Taylor. I saw them fighting at exactly 11:00 at night, I remember that Robert threw the first punch, despite what people said. I eventually got bored and went home to bed, and when I woke up I found out that Robert had been killed as a result of that fight escalating. It was a really strange feeling... watching them fight was like watching a movie; it scares you but you know it isn’t real. I started going home earlier after that. {Memory 2: Mum} last April, Mum called. I usually return her calls because she’s a very nice woman, despite her emotional instability. I didn’t pick up the phone, but when I finally did I snapped at her because of how much she was calling, I apologised right after but I didn’t really forgive myself. Mum and Dad got divorced when I was 13 and she’s never had another boyfriend apart from that guy who tried to steal from her back in ‘99. Because of this, she always calls so that she can feel a little less lonely. She pretends that I’m not doing well on

my own so that she can lie about not being dependent on her own son, and I think she’s started to believe it. She says that she worries about me, and I’m sure she does, but I know that isn’t why she calls. {Memory 3: Geneva} Back in 1994, when I was about 12, I met this girl named Geneva. She was probably the reason I realised who was a little person and who wasn’t. I remember one day we were doing a scavenger hunt on the last day of school, and we were put into groups of three. The third girl went to the bathroom and me and Geneva just sat there. We just sat there because we felt safe around one another, she radiated an energy of love and safety I’d never seen in anyone else, she was perfect. While we were waiting for the other girl to come back from the bathroom she turned to me “Hey. Have you ever ran away from home?” I shook my head “I’m gonna run away, you know,” She looked away “No, I didn’t know that…” She reached into her pocket and gave me a bracelet.

“Okay. Look, I don’t know you, but you seem nice. You can never tell anyone what happened here.” And then she just… ran off. She ran past the trees and jumped the fence, and that was it. It doesn’t sound as amazing in writing, but that's usually how these things go. The simplest things are the most memorable. We weren’t allowed to talk about it at school, the teachers needed to do what they did best; force what they wanted instead of using trust and respect. We only got asked a few questions, we were kids after all. They never found her.

To read the rest of the story go to https://issuu.com/youthzine2021