It was raining the day I met Christabel. We were standing side by side at the car park, waiting the next bus. She had on a yellow raincoat and black galosh. She looked like a school girl with her bag carving a hunch beneath her coat. I was bare. Like a cloudy morning, when all seems insipid and wet and grey, I was bare.
"Mind sharing my coat?" she yelled through the rain. I didn't hear her. I was enjoying the pelting of the rain against my hairless skull.
I remember smiling in her direction, not at her, at something, I do not remember what, but then was when I caught her smiling at me.
"You're strange," she said.
"Are you talking to me?"
"I asked if you wanted to share my coat."
"No, thank you."
"For what?"
"You asked if I wanted to share-"
"I know what I said."
The bus arrived. She went in. I stood there. Watched the bus get filled up. And as it rode away, Christabel, seated by the window, watched me. Like a horizon she watched me. I imagine I must have looked like rainbow after the rain. My purple shoes, sky blue jeans, and purple shirt to match. For there I stood, unfazed, motionless, like stone amidst cobblestones.
Christabel and I, we would meet again. Not in a car park. Not in a coffee shop or a fancy restaurant. We would meet at a funeral. A friend would drag me there, so he could pay his final respect to a lost friend. And there, standing before the casket, kissing the cross on my neck and saying a prayer for a total stranger, we would meet.
For the first time I would come to realize the freckles at the tip of her nose, her long lashes, her love-shaped lips, and the gentle line between her jaw. For the first time in my two-decades-and-counting years on earth, I would wish I'd said more at the car park. Maybe gotten in the bus and sat right next to Christabel.