It's been one of the few days that I've decided not to wear my headphones on the way home from my kindergarten. I usually wear them to drown out the noise and also to avoid general conversation, but the new headphones I have don't really cooperate with the size of my ear-hole and after awhile they begin to hurt. Not that these headphones really stop anyone from talking to me here anyways, but I always hope that the western influence will leak over and that social barrier will come into effect.
Without my headphones, I got to hear a little splash on my last bus. It was right next to me and was accompanied by a wet feeling on my foot. Great, someone must have spilled some kind of juice all over me. I turned and expected to find some child being scolded by their mother for spilling their drink. I kept looking. And looking. I turned my head up and found the source of the liquid; a twenty-something year old man with glasses and little wet spots all down the front of his grey-blue polo. Then I noticed this was dripping down from his mouth.
Bodily fluids usually fall into a category that most people can agree upon as things that don't belong on anyone but yourself. Swallowing our own spittle: acceptable. Even consider swallowing another person's spittle: completely unacceptable beyond all reason. I'm not a stickler when it comes to sharing food or drink, but the very idea that someone else has inserted their saliva into something I'm about to consume makes my whole body seize up. I think this goes along with eating things off the ground. As a child, I'm sure I wouldn't have hesitated to rescue a fallen piece of chocolate had it escaped my grasp, no matter where it came to land. But like most people, I grew into a greater knowledge that ground food is off limits. Every single day I see children under the age of five picking food off the floor and stuffing it into their small mouths without a second thought. Basically anything can go into their mouth as far as they're concerned.
What really gets me now is the weird defining difference that I feel about these things whether they're coming from an adult or a child. If a child has their hand in their mouth and wants a high five, I try and steer them towards using the other hand, but if they manage to grab me, I try not to mind. Even when one student got so upset that their mother left them at school that they vomited all over my foot, I was surprisingly not very agitated. A quick wipe from a tissue and the vomit went out of my head.
But with an adult, there is a comfort threshold that is breached. All of the sudden my senses are heightened and I can feel every little droplet of vomit dripping down my leg. My mind identifies some sort of smell that must be everything littered all over the floor. I can feel my skin pull slightly tighter as the liquid begins to dry to the hairs on my leg and all I want to do is die.
What is this arbitrary line? Maybe it was just some point of innocence. Children usually don't intentionally mean to wrong you (in this case, vomiting on you, but other liquids are in the same category), they just do. An adult has this type of responsibility to the community to try and keep their fluids inside their bodies (at least until we get to the next bus stop). Is it really some kind of innocent vomit if it comes from a child's mouth? What is the distinction? There was the possibility that I was being highly inconsiderate with this man's expulsion. I really took no account of what had been happening to him, maybe he had innocent vomit too.
Despite this, I found myself sitting on a bus for another ten minutes as saw the liquid spread itself throughout the bus. I had been fortunate in that aspect that nothing was chunky and he hadn't fully thrown up on me.
I stared at this man with a look of utter disgust on my face. I'm sure that I made an audible sound of disgust, but the man never noticed as he seemed to be in his own world. Whether drunk or sick, the man stood up with some after-vomit still clinging to his nose, and stumbled off at the next stop, leaving the rest of us to deal with his mess.
Moving my head around, I gave a look that said, "I can't believe something disgusting like this could happen." and expected to get this look in return. As I kept looking, the look I read on people's faces generally said something like, "Eh." as they turned their heads back to the windows. It was like I was the only one who knew what this man had done. I looked around again, almost desperate for someone to agree with me in this. Was it the same look, or were they saying, "It was an innocent vomit."?
I resigned myself to staring down resentfully at the mess that was now moving towards my other foot until my stop came. As the doors opened, the next crowd of people exited and entered the bus as I hopped over a puddle, now smeared and forgotten so quickly.
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