A while back, a kid got on a bus and didn’t sit next to a girl with a beautiful neck, deciding to sit next to me instead.
Yesterday, a different young woman got on the bus at a different stop, and sat on her own.
A few stops later, a young lad got on, and they knew each other a bit clearly cause he sort of did a little shy wave to her and she did the same back.
Now, there were plenty of free seats and he could have taken any single one, or a double to himself, or – and this would have broken me – sat next to me.
He could have left it at that. A wave, a little acknowledgement of each other, and then sit somewhere, headphones on, looking out the window and sometimes glancing at her reflection in the glass.
But he sat next to her, and it was lovely, because he was a sort of little hamster-faced bloke but he was smiling and not talking to her but listening and she was smiling and chatting with him. And, yes, she twirled her fingers in her hair sometimes, and, yes, he was on his best, nicest behaviour, but it was clearly honest.
I don’t know what happened when they left the bus to go to their college or whatever, or whether they would go out or get on with each other outside of the confines of Arriva’s grimy-windowed chuggers.
But for that ten minutes, they were both in the moment, and in the moment together.
It was lovely, and it was enough.
