She tried three times to give me her Snapchat ID. I never got it
I don't know her name. I don't know where she lives. I don't know one single fact about her. I met her on a bus, I never spoke to her once, and I have thought about her more than people I have known for years.
I'm 27. I've spent my whole life quietly avoiding exactly this kind of moment. Staying in my seat. Not looking up. I never once minded. Not until that evening.
It was an express bus, the late afternoon service, about an hour's ride. I hadn't planned the trip at all . it was one stretch inside a much longer journey I was already making, for reasons that had nothing to do with any of this. If a single thing had gone differently that week I would never have been on that bus.
We got on at the same stop and ended up almost in the same row, a couple of seats apart, her near the window. For that first stretch she was nothing to me but a stranger. I didn't look twice.
Then she gave her seat to someone else and moved back to stand near her family. Three or four rows between us. That distance is the only reason any of this happened.
I don't remember who looked first. I only remember looking up and finding her eyes already on me. For a second I didn't know what to do. Look away? Smile? Pretend I hadn't noticed? I did none of those. I just kept looking.
Every time our eyes met after that I felt a strange pressure in my chest. Not uncomfortable exactly. More like I'd suddenly become too aware of myself where I was sitting, how I was sitting, what she might be thinking.
She was covered head to toe. I could not see her face at all. Only her eyes. She was laughing, and the smile was there in them, so I smiled too.
After a while it turned into a game. Look away. Look back. She was already looking. Four or five times, like we were competing to see who would give in first.
For almost half an hour we said nothing at all. And it never once felt like silence.
Then she started making little signs with her eyes. I couldn't understand them. She tried again. Still nothing. She raised her eyebrows, as if to ask "what's going on?" I raised mine back.
Then she took out her phone.
She was trying to show me her Snapchat ID. The road was rough and every time the bus moved her phone moved with it. Three or four rows away, with the engine going under both of us, the background on her screen made the username almost impossible to read. Maybe that's why I couldn't get it. Or maybe I was just too nervous to focus.
She took a screenshot. Zoomed in. Held it up again. Still nothing.
That's when it hit me. She wasn't looking at me for fun. She was genuinely trying to give me a way to reach her.
So I got up. My heart was going faster than it should have for walking a few rows. The aisle was packed — people standing, bags between feet — and I had to turn sideways and squeeze past them the whole way, asking myself if I was actually doing this. For once I wasn't thinking about what anyone around me might think. I was just trying to reach her.
Then I heard the conductor calling her stop. Her mother was already standing, telling her to get down. Her sister was ahead of them in the aisle.
I reached her exactly as she had to leave. A lifetime of hesitating, and I was late by about ten seconds.
She stepped down. Outside, a dozen women in burkha were getting off at the same stop and for a second I lost her completely in the crowd. But something in the way she stood told me it was her before I could even be sure.
She said something to her mother, then started walking toward my window with her phone pressed to her ear, like she was on a call. Her mother was right there the whole time, watching the bags, the road, everything — and she kept talking into that phone the entire way, never once looking like she was doing anything but making a call.
She got close enough, lowered the phone for a second, and held up the screen. I tried. I still couldn't read it.
She turned and walked back toward her mother. Before she looked away completely, her eyes asked me a question I understood without a single word: did you get it?
I shook my head. No.
She tried again same trick, phone back at her ear, walking toward the window like it was nothing at all. She held the screen up a second time. I still couldn't get it.
This time I took out my own phone and tried to photograph it instead. But my camera couldn't focus fast enough. The username came out blurred.
It was only then, a little too late, that I finally understood the small gestures she'd been making with her eyes all along. I understood her at the exact moment they stopped mattering.
The bus started moving.
She stayed where she was. I stayed where I was. And we kept looking at each other the whole way down that road, until the distance was too much, until I couldn't make her out anymore.
And then she was gone.
No name. No face. No Snapchat. Not even a proper goodbye.
I didn't lose someone I knew. I lost the only chance I would ever have to know her at all.
She got home that evening and went on with her life.
I never got off that bus.