Paris was fine,
though the girls stared at us
whenever we took the bus,
and the bus we boarded
was never going to our destination.
Paris was fine,
and then we left it
and haven’t thought of it once since then.
Until today
Paris was just fine.
But today there were
these girls on the bus
who cast knowing glances at me
all the way, who giggled and
who as they got off
spoke loudly to each other
in a language I didn’t understand;
who left me on a bus
that wasn’t going to my destination.

 Image: Bus 89 by Jean-François Gornet, published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license....