Close Menu
Honi Soit
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
    Trending
    •  “Like diaspora, pollen needs to bescattered to different places to survive and grow”: Dual Opening of ‘Germinate/Propagate/Bloom’, and ‘Last Call’ at 4A Centre of Contemporary Asian Art
    • Akinola Davies Jr. on My Father’s Shadow, Namesakes, and Nostalgia: An Interview
    • Into the Blue: Underwater Robots Unveil the Secrets of Norfolk Island’s Deep
    • Ancient Reef Cores Reveal Fragile Future for the Great Barrier Reef
    • Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, and Rameau walk into the Oldest Sydney Church
    • The Raftsmen: An Interview with Dr. Chadden Hunter — Sydney Film Festival Exclusive
    • The Anarchy 1138-53: to play or to plunder?
    • The Wrong Gods Review: Sacred Soil and Shifting Futures
    • About
    • Print Edition
    • Student Journalism Conference 2025
    • Writing Comp
    • Advertise
    • Locations
    • Contact
    Facebook Instagram X (Twitter) TikTok
    Honi SoitHoni Soit
    Sunday, June 15
    • News
    • Analysis
    • Culture
    • Opinion
    • University
    • Features
    • Perspective
    • Investigation
    • Reviews
    • Comedy
    • Student Journalism Conference 2025
    Honi Soit
    Home»Creative

    The in-between: The joys of commuting

    Thoughts and memories on a bus ride.
    By Genevieve CouvretFebruary 23, 2020 Creative 4 Mins Read
    Share
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email

    I probably won’t remember this bus ride. And you probably won’t remember that train you missed yesterday morning, or the walk you took your dogs on a couple days ago, when you noticed that the jacarandas had started blooming. 

    But it is these forgotten moments that texture the fabric of your life. They may not sing in your memory, but they colour the ordinariness of your day. That’s how I think about my commute. As George Eliot said, “What novelty is worth that sweet monotony, where everything is known and loved because it is known?”

    We all suffer the indifference of time; something that could never be captured in the ticking of a clock, or the regular beating of a heart. Time is always either too early, stealing you into the next morning before the night feels through, or too late, trapping you in the space between the seconds it clings to. But time can’t be fickle while you’re commuting – it can’t keep up. In a moment where you may feel so inert and inactive, you’re also constantly moving. Stillness and pace coalesce. Time forgets itself.  

    These may be minutes or even hours you’ll never get back, as the train shoots through tunnels, or the bus swerves around narrow corners, or the plane screams through the sky.  While I sit here, I watch everybody huddled together on this crowded bus, sharing their aloneness, their eyes boring into the backs of each other’s headrests or out the window collectively not thinking, thoughts blurring together like the headlights through the window against the sky, its blue deepening like the evening. This patient interstice could be one of waiting, or of simply watching. And what makes all the difference is what’s on the other side. Or what you imagine there to be. 

    We all wish time away. Whether it be this bus ride, or the week before that party on Saturday night, that party itself before you get to go home, the years before you can move out, get a job, start your life. But your life does not start when you attain that transient object which is ever absent, when you arrive at some abstract satisfaction that’s always changing its face. That’s more illusory, more constructed, than time itself. 

    At some point you’ll look back on that walk, or that holiday, or that degree as if it were one compressed memory, when in fact any experience of something is a collection of tiny thoughts, moments in-between memory, forgotten as they happen. Tasting the humidity when you leave your house to go to work, watching the pavement glisten after a light shower of rain and being thankful you remembered your umbrella as you race to that appointment, feeling the air between your hands and his hands as they swung side by side, almost touching, walking home from school. 

    So maybe I never want this bus ride to end. So that everything will always be in front or behind me, and I will be in-between the times in my life. I can just watch the trees go by and listen to The Beatles and look up at the sky and think, or not think, of everything and nothing, of him and of me, together and separate, and leave all sense of time and responsibility and pain on either end of this trip that has no end. 

    Maybe I often take this trip in my mind. I’m sure you do too. You hold onto things and fixate on them or relive moments, you let your thoughts spiral into a time that never was or never will be, you remove yourself from the present. You let yourself roam in the almost. A purely imagined space, an unreal time. And as your memories forget you, you don’t have to deal with tomorrow, or yesterday. You escape today, and until you get off that bus, you are never really anywhere. 

    Memory TIME travel

    Keep Reading

    The Music of Memory

    The Superstitions We Inherit

    Chronocracies; Who Owns Time?

    A Small Inventory

    Bird Vignettes

    hung parliament (we never asked to be so star-crossed)

    Just In

     “Like diaspora, pollen needs to bescattered to different places to survive and grow”: Dual Opening of ‘Germinate/Propagate/Bloom’, and ‘Last Call’ at 4A Centre of Contemporary Asian Art

    June 15, 2025

    Akinola Davies Jr. on My Father’s Shadow, Namesakes, and Nostalgia: An Interview

    June 11, 2025

    Into the Blue: Underwater Robots Unveil the Secrets of Norfolk Island’s Deep

    June 11, 2025

    Ancient Reef Cores Reveal Fragile Future for the Great Barrier Reef

    June 11, 2025
    Editor's Picks

    Part One: The Tale of the Corporate University

    May 28, 2025

    “Thank you Conspiracy!” says Capitalism, as it survives another day

    May 21, 2025

    A meditation on God and the impossible pursuit of answers

    May 14, 2025

    We Will Be Remembered As More Than Administrative Errors

    May 7, 2025
    Facebook Instagram X (Twitter) TikTok

    From the mines

    • News
    • Analysis
    • Higher Education
    • Culture
    • Features
    • Investigation
    • Comedy
    • Editorials
    • Letters
    • Misc

     

    • Opinion
    • Perspective
    • Profiles
    • Reviews
    • Science
    • Social
    • Sport
    • SRC Reports
    • Tech

    Admin

    • About
    • Editors
    • Send an Anonymous Tip
    • Write/Produce/Create For Us
    • Print Edition
    • Locations
    • Archive
    • Advertise in Honi Soit
    • Contact Us

    We acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. The University of Sydney – where we write, publish and distribute Honi Soit – is on the sovereign land of these people. As students and journalists, we recognise our complicity in the ongoing colonisation of Indigenous land. In recognition of our privilege, we vow to not only include, but to prioritise and centre the experiences of Indigenous people, and to be reflective when we fail to be a counterpoint to the racism that plagues the mainstream media.

    © 2025 Honi Soit
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms
    • Accessibility

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.