It is 6:00 a.m. on Monday. As I look for a spot to park my car, faceless bus liners glide past me like mannequins on a conveyer belt.

Cartoon by Rossana Henriques

Even as I am surrounded by more people than I could possibility get to know in a lifetime, silence is real and unnerving. It is in many ways a boring fifteen minutes standing waiting for the bus to stop and take us to New York. I can almost always feel the rising tension among my fellow riders if the waiting extends beyond the scheduled time. And it almost always does.

I do not know these people. Not personally. But they are not altogether strangers to me. And some are not here at all. They wait in their cars while their personal items stand on line for them. These can be anything, including umbrellas, plastic bags, backpacks, suitcases pencils, key chains, and even a golf ball. These are not just lifeless things, they are important parts of their owners, and because of these objects, I have a pretty good idea of who they belong to, what their owners do, how they dress and even what their hobbies are.

The third item in front of me is a leather bag with big red “Colgate” letters on a white background. This is my “Colgate Man,” a nickname I came up with about a year ago. If you were a Martian with no concept of human clothing, his dark suit and white long-sleeved shirt would appear to be his skin, as I have never seen him without them. His extremely unwrinkled and tidy slacks and shirt always puzzle me. I see no point in it, as after an hour and a half of sitting, they always look like he slept on them. I used to see the Colgate bag behind me. Today must be an unusual day for him; he is not an early riser.

The big plastic red heart key chain, which holds the second place in line, belongs to a woman who, well, at least, does not hold very fond memories of me. It was about nine months ago when she approached me with noticeable irritation in her voice, “You know, you cut in front of me!” I couldn’t hide my embarrassment and hastily mumbled back something apologetic while I repositioned myself behind her. , I remember that in this particular instance I was preoccupied with work and, with no success, was telling myself not to think about the backlog of emails waiting for me at my desk after two weeks’ vacation. Deep within these thoughts, I did not remember cutting her off.

The big light blue bag with a dark tropical tree silhouette that is sitting at the end of line belongs to our late riser. It is rare that she can make the 6:25 a.m. bus. I see her in NY at Port Authority, and on the return bus to NJ more often than here. Once, during one of those high-level terrorist alerts, after a frustrating 40-minute standing in the bus line, she unexpectedly turned to me and said “Maybe I should go back to Croatia—I was a teacher you know.” I awkwardly smiled back and purposefully glanced at my watch a couple of times. I was just too stressed to start a conversation. Thankfully, she stopped talking. Months later, I saw her waiting next to her car with the hood open in the parking lot. Her car was next to mine and there was nobody around, so I felt obligated to speak with her and offered her a jump start. I remember that we exchanged names at the time but we never had a chance to use them. We see each other now and then but we pretend not to.

We are the commuters constantly in motion between NJ and NYC, hopping up and down in buses, dashing back and forth in the streets of Manhattan before reaching our determined destinations, then returning back where we started, all before dark. Except for the time of arrival or departure of buses and trains, we do not discover much about the city. Formal suits, dresses and PCs reveal a certain truth about us; we are deskbound. Some of us may work in the financial district downtown or some may work in a midtown office. Except in rare cases, we do not spend a drowsy afternoon in Central Park or watch the ships go by on the Hudson River. Not many among us ever awakened to Manhattan’s morning or spent silent moments in the reading room of the Public Library. We pour rolling down the city from the mountain valleys like ants with the rising sun and we retreat when the sun burns like glowing coals on the wide windows of tall buildings. We are no vacationers, we pay attention to the filthy streets of the city and they sicken us, as we fly through them. By the time we arrive at our destinations, we’re already thinking about returning.

And we return; the bus can almost be as quiet as in the morning. Part of the reason for this, no doubt, is circumstances. For one thing, unlike my countrymen and women (from Turkey) who can comfortably display even their deepest passions on a bumper sticker, New Jersey residents do not wear their frustrations and their clashing hearts on their sleeves. They do not bleed their everyday down-to-earth problems such as their bank credit cards, 30-year mortgages and car loans as comfortably with each other as my natives. There may be other cultural factors that account for the differences among international commuters. I remember, once during my junior year as a commuter, I attempted to give my seat to an elderly woman (an expected practice in Turkey) who had been standing next to me for more than an hour. I was politely rejected and even received a dirty look.

Yet beneath the surface, there is a kind of commonness, a shared belief among all commuters regardless of where we are, who we are. That is, we seem to know why we commute and what it is all worth.