By the time the bus reached Omaha, Nebraska the Greyhound bus was filled with more passengers and there were now less vacant seats on the bus. In fact, the only available vacant seats were two seats near the back of the bus: the vacant seat next to me and the vacant seat next to a taller and heavier big white guy across the aisle from me, who didn't have a beard and long hair like I then did. So, when a short, thin African-American woman, wearing slacks, who looked like she wasn't yet in her 20's like I was by the 1970's, had to choose which vacant seat to take, she, not surprisingly, decided that the vacant bus seat next to me was the better place to sit while riding the bus during the night and trying to get some sleep during the night on the bus, until the bus reached Salt Lake City, by way of Laramie, Wyoming.
Before people started using Walkman and plugging Walkman devices into their ears in order to listen to music while riding on buses in the late 1970's, it wasn't that unusual for passengers sitting next to strangers on Greyhound buses to converse with each other during a bus ride, in order to make time pass by faster when they weren't trying to sleep a little on the bus or didn't feel like reading a book on the bus (especially if reading a book on a moving bus made them feel nauseous).
So after the bus started rolling west on the highway out of Omaha, Nebraska in the night, the young woman sitting next to me and I started to quietly converse a bit on the dimly lit bus.
"How far are you going?" I asked.
"To Los Angeles. I'm meeting my boyfriend there to get married," she replied with an excited smile.
I can't recall now what else we briefly talked about before we both turned off the bulbs above our seats and each tried to fall asleep on the uncomfortable narrow seats within the now darkened bus.
By the 1970's, I had read about the Sal character in Jack Kerouac's On The Road novel becoming involved for awhile with a Latina woman he first encountered sitting near him while he was traveling on a Greyhound bus ride on the West Coast. But I was still surprised to feel the soon-to-be-married young woman from Omaha leaning closer into me from her aisle seat, and resting her head against my chest and between my arms as we both began to doze off to sleep during the night bus ride. And by the early morning hours, we were sleeping entwined, as if our two adjacent bus seats were being occupied by a couple of young lovers.
Feeling her young woman's body so physically close to mine all during the night was a pleasurable feeling for me that also made it easier for me to sleep. And the moments during the night when she awoke to shift her body's sleeping position slightly, and, still half-asleep, touched me in an affectionate way, made me, who was also half-asleep, feel that I was living in some kind of dream world with the soon-to-be-married young woman from Omaha.
By the time we reached Laramie, Wyoming, however, the sun was out, it was daylight and the young African-American woman sitting next to me and I had both awakened. Having slept in each other's arms during the night, we now looked at each other in a different way than when she had first boarded the bus in Omaha; and we now told each other what our first names were (although I long ago forgot what she said her first name was). Then, during the bus stopover in Laramie, Wyoming, she went into the women's restroom to freshen up and returned to the reboarding bus station platform with a scarf covering her hair and looking as if she was about to go on a date.
I no longer recall what we talked about after we both reboarded the bus in Laramie and sat next to each other while awake on the bus ride from Laramie, through the rest of Wyoming and onto Salt Lake City, where she was going to leave the bus for San Francisco that I was on, in order to transfer to another bus that would take her from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. But I do remember wishing her the best of luck in her marriage, before I reboarded my bus for San Francisco at the Salt Lake City bus station while she continued to wait for the bus that had not yet arrived in Salt Lake City to take her to get married in Los Angeles..
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