Night Bus Windows

Dear Delyara, I leaned my forehead against the glass of the upper deck tonight and felt my skin stick against a smudge left by a previous passenger. It was a deeply unpleasant, immediate reminder of the city’s shared surfaces. We are constantly rubbing against the invisible physical residue of strangers—their oils, their breaths, their skin cells—pretending we are completely separate entities while navigating the exact same metal tubes.