A Case of the Crazies

Round about the time I started college, I'd gotten on my usual bus back home. Across from me were two girls, one whom I knew from school.

A few stops into the journey, a man wearing scruffy clothes and a massive travelling rucksack came onto the bus and stood by the drivers cab, talking to him. Assuming he was a friend or regular of the driver, I ignored him and daydreamed.

A few minutes later he came up towards the back of the bus. Up close he looked far rougher than I imagined, and on instinct I slide my bag between myself and the window. He sat down in the seat behind the girls.

And he started to talk to them. Asked them if they went to school, what they studied. They lied of course, said they were studying to be chiefs; it's only natural when a weird man, who you have never met before, starts a random conversation. They continued to chat to each other, occasionally answering the man with short answers before returning to their own conversations. Yet, the man carried on talking to them.

I continued to stare out of the window, half listening.

"He must have something wrong with him, or he's a junkie." I thought. "He's probably crazy."

'Crazy like me?' asked Loki softly. "Aren't we all a little bit crazy?"

That made me stop and think, and after a few moments I started to listen to the man.

He praised them on going to school and said that he himself was once a chief; but he got into the wrong crowd, did drugs, and one night a fight broke out. Someone stabbed him with a used needle...and ended up he had contracted HIV from the wound. He had to quit his job as a chief. But he seemed happy; he told them he had been travelling around Africa for a five years, and was back to Scotland to visit a friend.

He then got off at his stop and as the bus carried on. The girls started to laugh. They giggled over how they thought he was going to mug them. They called him a psycho, a weirdo,  mocked his story.

I felt a swell of anger towards them. I felt I had taken and learned something from his story, which he had chosen to talk about to two random girls on a bus. I felt I had been given a small grain of wisdom, and was horrified that they simply dismissed him because he had spoken to them.

I then became angry at myself for judging him so quickly at the start.

I felt Loki smile and nod.

'Maybe crazy people aren't all that crazy. Maybe they are simply travelers who have a good story to tell.'