Mikey and the Chickadee

Chapter 1 - Part 1

In a word: stability. This man in his gray suit radiated stability, there in the rain next to a lamppost, not leaning against it as I would have done, but standing on his own two legs as he texted furiously away on his massive phone.

I stood just under the eaves of a bus shelter, on the cusp, as I was these days, of a life more adventurous.

Not the least bit troubled as his screen became flecked with water, he glanced right, south, the direction from which he, both of us, several of us, knew the bus to come.

Pathetically, this was the latest along a string of encounters acknowledged only, it seemed, within my own mind. The thread had grown lengthy enough to reach back six months to a time when a summer spent traveling clung on by one finger and I settled into my first post-grad occupation in Accounting. Yes, it's true that I had traveled, seen Europe with two friends from my college program, and it was an experience every bit as enriching as they had convinced me it would be. For nearly two months I screamed, I laughed, I became someone; I met people on the road whom I revealed my whole self to unhesitatingly. Later on, the enormity of this personal growth would serve only to enhance my disappointment and self-loathing when I slipped with alarming ease back into complacence, gasping fish into pond, at home in my new job.

Perhaps there had existed a window of time during which I would have approached him, even with some semblance of confidence. This window began when I first assumed our shared bus route, set back down on the earth still ready to run, still willing to share myself, still holding the point of view that I was worth sharing. It ended when my mind no longer grasped so firmly the temporary perspective I had taken on, when outlines of memories were no longer in focus.

If this tiny window had existed at all, I had not taken significant notice of him from within its bounds. That happened later, on one of the last truly warm, sun-filled days, when I sat directly behind him, and he sat next to a small elderly woman. I was first exposed only to the back of his head, a shock of black-as-night hair that spiraled outward from a common center to form a structured mess that occurred to me as nest-like and effortlessly charming. Phone to his ear, he spoke with a voice that scooped up the surrounding air, in a language which, only after some time and with considerable effort, I identified as Thai. Apparently aware of his conspicuous presence on an otherwise quiet bus, his phone conversation was brief, and then he sat in silence.

In this town I would not take for granted another person's ability to speak English, however, the old woman next to him seemed to hold no such reservations.

"Do you ride this bus often?"

He turned to her and I caught one side of his face: the smooth skin of his cheek (not extremely dark but certainly darker than mine), the left eye, deep-brown and heavy-lidded, abbreviated nose, linear jaw angling cleanly upward near the neck.

"Yeah I do," he said with no particular accent that I could detect. "I ride it to work." He then smiled with such genuine compassion that the woman may as well have been his own grandmother.

"I thought so," she said. "I remember you from the last time I was on, but that was weeks ago." Her shoulders shook in quiet laughter.

"I'm sure it was me. I've been riding this route for more than a year." He then proceeded to ask her about her day and, as her answers came, regarded her with careful interest.

As I listened, forever a shameless eavesdropper, I, too, realized it wasn't the first time I'd seen him. And in the months to come I would continue to notice him. It wasn't something that happened every day. I did sustain a compelling interest in my career of choice, and I will admit that there were days when I was so engrossed in preparing for work that I couldn't have recalled whether he had ridden the bus that day at all.