  Alden Nowlan A Note on the Public Transportaion Sysytem It's not hard to begin a conversation with the person who happens to be seated nearest you, especially when shes been reading with apparent interest a book that's one of your favourites and cant find her matches. The difficulty is once you've spoken you can never go back to being comfortable with silence, even if you learn you've nothing to say and would rather not listen. You can stop talking but you can't forget the broken wires dangling there between you. Youll smile almost guiltily when your glances accidentally bump. It may get so bad that one of you will have to pretend to fall asleep. This poem has been one of my favourites since I was roughly 16. At first, I took it at face value, picturing in my head, two people seated on a bus, engaged in polite chit chat. Within a matter of minutes, they both run out of things to say. What do you do in that situation? If you simply stop talking, the silence becomes increasinly awkward, until one you has to "fall asleep". After being assigned to present an analysis of the poem to the class, I realized there was a broader meaning behind it. It explains, in a subtle way, a very real phenomenon in our society. No longer are we born, raised, and buried in a small community, only interacting with maybe two hundred people in our entire lifetimes. In the modern world, our social circle is constantly changing and evolving. Every so often, we run into "someone we used to know".
We all know what happens, your eyes meet, and for a second, you assume that you can pretend you haven't been absent from each others lives. As soon as the conversation starts, however, you're thrown into an awkward, forced swirl of "So, how have you been? ", "How's your brother", and "Have you talked to Sandi, lately". Finally, one of you can't take it anymore, and cuts themselves loose.
"Well, I really should be going", even though you know you've got three hours to kill before Footloose comes on TV. So what is it, that causes us to be so close with someone that you could never imagine your life without them, and then within a matter of months, being reduced to a mere set of dangling telephone wires? It's happened to almost all of us. 
