No Stranger

We met at a bus stop. You offered me a cigarette and I thought it was funny. Not many people smoke those nowadays. You said you had always been a sucker for the old fashioned, and I could see that in your eyes. It was like your pupils were black holes, pulling all the light of your irises into their swirling destruction. You had your headphones wrapped around your neck like a shawl, and I could see what you were listening to when your phone lit up. Bob Dylan. A classic. You really were old fashioned. 

You asked where I was going, and I shrugged. I was heading home….or what I had once considered to be home. Now it was just four walls and a roof. I’m not sure why I told you that. You nodded like you knew things hadn’t been the same since she left since the house was suddenly just me and Dad. I asked you where you were going. You looked at the sign on the bus like you hadn’t noticed it had a destination at first. Then you sighed and looked at your phone again. Whoever you wanted to text you hadn’t done so. You told me you weren’t going anywhere in particular. You said you were heading to your family since you had a long weekend from school. I nodded, and the bus opened its doors. 

Neither of us made a conscious decision to sit together, but there we were, on a crowded bus, two strangers lost in the vacuum of anonymity, side by side. You told me you didn’t like school, that everyone was desperate to assign meaning to things that at their core, had no meaning. I nodded and glanced out the window.

 The world outside was only divided by a thin glass sheet, but it may as well have been a different universe. You and I were the only three-dimensional people in the world at that moment. Everyone else was just a faded piece of background.

 I told you how I was thinking of quitting my job. I told you I had been to the beach once when I was young and my family was happy, and all I wanted to do was go back. You told me you understood and I told you how much I wanted to travel. You told me you wanted to study abroad, maybe Europe. I said that sounded lovely. You asked me what I would do if I quit my job. I admitted I had been writing poetry lately. You didn’t laugh, just nodded and I imagine you created images of me as some Robert Frost. I hadn’t told anyone that. 

We were both quiet for a long while, and I figured you might have fallen asleep. It was a long bus ride, and trips through the fabric of the Universe tend to exhaust a person. 

But then you glanced back at me and asked how old I was. I told you, and you sighed as if I had just delivered you a death notice. You looked up at the ceiling of the bus as if the map to happiness was written on the overhead compartment. You started talking about how fast time went, and I thought it was funny. Time was a constant, was it not? I asked. You shrugged. You said that there were certain places where time was longer and other places where time all but stopped. I asked where. You glanced around the bus, the black holes of your eyes pulling in all the light from the bus. Maybe that’s why everything was so faded on the bus, maybe you were stealing all the light for your all-consuming eyes. You said here. You said certain places were suspended in time, places where you could say all the things that kept you awake at night and never think about it again. Where you could converse with a stranger about everything and nothing all at once, where for a second you were the most authentic version of you there was. And that, that was powerful enough to stop time. As soon as we stepped off that bus, you told me, leaning in as if you were sharing some secret, time start again and it’s like we never met. 

I didn’t respond, because I didn’t think any words out of my mouth could compare to what you had spoken. Maybe you were right. Two people could meet in the dark in a suspended space, and tell them all their secrets. The things they had kept from their parents, their siblings, their friends, and lovers. Maybe you were right. I asked you why we couldn’t just be like we are on the bus all the time. You leaned in closer and, with a youthful glint in your eye, whispered that it was too loud out there. I thought about this. I hadn’t noticed a baby at the bus stop, but I could hear one crying faintly in the background. I looked around and wondered how many people on this bus were also suspended, like me. How many of them were clinging to the shreds of their innocence and the American Dream to avoid falling into the depths of the unknown? Perhaps you were wrong. Perhaps that moment, you and I on the bus, is the only time I wasn’t suspended. 

You said you were going to move to California someday. You grew up there, and you still had a lot of family in the area. You said that the streets of San Fransisco were the only place you felt like your heart wasn’t on the verge of stopping. I told you I wasn’t ready to move anywhere. I wanted to go wherever the wind blew me, to travel and write and backpack Europe and fall in love with everything and everyone I encountered. You nodded and said that maybe you would like to do that too. It wasn’t long before our stop came, and you smiled at me like you knew some secret I didn’t. I guess, perhaps you did. Your all-consuming eyes had a hint of sadness as you turned to me. 

 You said that it was funny two people could have the same dreams. You asked if maybe everyone in the world wanted what we did. I nodded. You sighed and stared at the ceiling again. Sometimes I like to think you were talking to God in those moments. You said it was sad, how once we got off this bus we would go back to our normal lives. We would never travel. You were never going to make it to California. You’d marry a doctor and raise kids in Arizona. I would stay at my job, marry a secretary I met on a blind date, and save money for my kid's college fund, and then our kids would grow up to do the same thing. 

It was the scariest thought anyone could have. I shook my head, not to deny you, but myself. 

Sometimes when I’m in an airport, I think about you. I never did catch your name, but I think that’s the point of the anonymity. Sometimes I look for your face, hoping to catch a glance of your light-stealing eyes in the sea of faces. I wondered what I would say. I quit my job. I’m on my way to Africa to volunteer. A writing conference in Seattle, a love connection in Australia. It would be a different story every time, wouldn’t it? I hope you did it too. I like to think the reason I never see you is because your heart is too busy beating and your eyes too busy stealing the light from the streets of San Francisco.