public obs I’ve been thinking about
I was on the bus a few weeks ago, just scrolling on my phone absorbed in my own thing. Someone got on the bus and sat down in the back a few seats away from me. I noticed they were sneezing and coughing quite a bit, but I’m not the type of person who looks up when a stranger sneezes, I’m too afraid they’ll notice me or something, so I kept my head down.
The sneezes were quite sick-sounding and wet and the coughs would follow, deep and wet but obviously trying to be contained. I wish I had looked up to notice if she was covering or not, I was curious. I looked up while she wasn’t sneezing and saw that she was holding a brown paper pharmacy bag that was crinkling in her lap.
She sneezed what seemed like every few minutes. idd-schew! Cough, cough.
I don’t mean this in a negative way at all but I did notice that she was trans, partially because her sneezes and coughs were a bit deeper. I hope that’s okay to say. She was wearing a very intentionally put-together outfit and I wondered if she had gotten dressed up because she wasn’t feeling well and wanted to counteract that, or if she was self-conscious of passing while sneezing and coughing, or if she just dressed like this all the time. She was wearing a black flat-brimmed hat, a denim jacket, a black skater skirt, and black tights. Kind of a 2016 type look but in a really cute way. She was thin, white, and had shoulder-length wavy brown hair and was probably 25-30. I saw her when she got up to leave the bus, she was sniffling. I wonder if the pharmacy meds were related to her cold or she was just coincidentally sick. I wonder if anyone else on the bus caught her cold. I wonder where she caught her cold from, too. I feel a little weird sexualizing a stranger like this so I do hope she wasn’t too miserable.
