On White Day the Boys Give Out Chocolate

It was an obscure moment. Brief as a breath, yet timeless.

When I finish my last class of the day, you might think that I would be in a rush to get home, escape the echoes of shrill screaming voices, the odd stilted atmosphere in the teachers' room, the Hellish temperature of the heating vents. But, oddly enough, the place is kind of peaceful after the kids leave. The teachers sit and chat a bit. Share the spoils of White Day, a piece of chocolate and a peppermint. A little warm down before we part.

It feels a little futile to go home, seeing as I'll just eat, crash, and be back in the morning. So I was in no hurry as I sauntered down the three flights of stairs and saw David coming back up. He had just stepped out for a smoke and now had to return to teach a late class.
"You just missed your bus," he said as he passed.

This sucks because now I'll have to wait a good twenty minutes for the next bus comes. Maybe more, maybe less. The buses in Daegu don't run on any kind of set schedule, so you never know. But the weather was nice, first time in a while, and I was in good spirits.

The first bus to pull up was the Blue 427. My eyes aren't so good, so I have to squint each time a bus approaches. At first, I can't even tell if it's blue or green, let alone if it's the 427 or the 414-1. The brakes whined as it came to a stop right in front of me. The bus was packed, standing room only. I was silently grateful it wasn't my bus.

My eyes wandered down the corridor, back to front, and came to rest directly in front of me. There was a girl standing there holding the bar for support. She was looking at me. That kind of distant casual voyerism practiced only through the protective windows of moving vehicles. Moving vehicles protect our anonymity and embolden us. Our eyes lock for an instant, then two. She's cute. We should look away, protect our privacy, our vanity, but we don't. The side door opens and some elderly people step out slowly, like poorly repaired broken machines.

I think at this moment we both begin to realize the oddity of the situation. It has become a situation. Her mouth cracks like glass into a smile. I must have smiled back for I saw its reflection in her face. A slow progression as our smiles reflected each other's, larger and larger. It's a profoundly intimate and timeless moment shared between two total strangers.

The side door shuts with a hiss of hydrolics, the bus groans forward. Our eyes remain locked as the bus pulls away. We're both smiling childishly. And then it ends. Like a rubber band snapped, our gazes break. And I return to the rush of traffic and cool evening breeze. A drunk old woman hugs a tree nearby, gaining composure before venturing forth into the night. And lacking explanation, the moment becomes magical, brief, unexpected, and divine.

Now I can't even remember her face.