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I welcome you to my entry for these week. It about two crushes that met every evening at the same bus stop, even though neither of them needed the bus.
She came with a book she never really read. He came with earphones that were never playing anything. They stood close enough to notice each other’s breathing, but far enough to pretend they were strangers.
They talked about small things. The weather. How late the buses were. How the city felt louder every year.
What they didn’t talk about was heavier.
He never said that he waited all day just to see her walk around the corner, pretending it was coincidence.
She never said that the bus stop felt safer than her empty apartment.
He didn’t say he was tired of being strong for everyone.
She didn’t say she was afraid of wanting something that might leave.
Sometimes their hands brushed.
Both noticed.
Both said nothing.
One evening, the bus came early. Too early. She stepped on first. He followed. They sat apart, like always. The silence stretched, full and loud.
At her stop, she stood up.
Turned.
Smiled.
“If we were braver,” she said, “we would have said more.”
He nodded. “If we were braver, we still can.”
But she was already stepping off.
The bus pulled away. The seat beside him stayed empty.
Years later, he would remember that bus stop more clearly than any place he had ever lived. Not because of what happened there but because of everything that almost did.
Some nights, long after the city had gone to sleep, he would trace the route the bus had taken that evening, imagining her sitting there, thinking the same thoughts he was thinking. He never tried to follow, never tried to call part of him feared that breaking the silence would shatter something delicate, like touching a glass sculpture and watching it crack.
He kept the memory alive in small ways. A book left open on the table, pages bent at the corners. A pair of earphones resting, unused, on the arm of a chair. They were placeholders for what he couldn’t say, monuments to the unsaid.
Sometimes, in the quiet, he would imagine her walking back toward the bus stop, just to speak the words that never came. Sometimes, he imagined taking her hand when it brushed his, and saying everything at once—the waiting, the hope, the fear.
But in reality, the bus stop remained empty. The city moved around him. He moved around it. And still, the pause between them lingered, heavier than any conversation they could have had.
And maybe that was the point. Some stories aren’t meant to be completed. Some connections exist only in the tension between what is spoken and what is not. They live in the in-between, in the quiet spaces of memory, in the almosts that shape us more than the haves.
He didn’t know if she ever remembered him at all. He didn’t know if she, too, kept a silent monument somewhere in her apartment, waiting for a word that never came.
All he knew was that some evenings, long after the buses had stopped running, he would find himself standing at that corner, imagining her turning the corner, imagining that they had finally said it all.
And in those moments, the world felt paused, suspended, and strangely full.
