I sat down next to the window, and watched the bus fill with people. I noted that a young man from my work was standing in the aisle, a few seats closer to the front. Such was to be expected of this bus route – it was near impossible to use it without running into somebody you know from somewhere. I decided against saying hello though, as I did not want to draw attention to myself in front of the rest of the commuters.
As my eyes wandered, I saw another familiar figure. In fact, she was standing directly in front of the man from my work. She was an old friend of mine, had been for years. I hadn’t seen her in a while though, also for years. She had the same honey-coloured hair that fell down to her hips, starting out dark before growing lighter and lighter. She was perhaps skinner than when I had last seen her, her plain baggy clothes falling off her in an almost alarming fashion.
She had always been small, but throughout high school I watched her waste away. It was perhaps around the time all of that started that she and I began to drift apart. When I should have been there for her, I pulled away because I was unable to cater to the self-destructive lifestyle she led.
We used to walk home together after school. I would go to her house twice a week, where we would make afternoon tea and she would show me her doll house furniture. She was quiet and lovely, and at that time just as innocent as I.
Even now her hair looked the same. But her arms were so thin. I felt a pang of guilt. I had no idea how her life moved these days, and from the look of her, it seemed to have taken a turn for the worse.
In our last year of high school, we rarely talked. We shared one class together, in which she would tell me about her new antidepressants and their expected side-effects. We would have to take her socks off, and we could all see the incisions that crept up each leg almost decoratively, but for the horrific reality of what they were and why they were there.
A year before that, we would sit together and she would tell me about how she had been reading through the court files, from all those years ago when she was four. She would leave out most of the details, but tell me how they would make her feel physically sick. The ones she didn’t leave out made me feel physically sick. It was around the same time that she stopped eating, and eventually could no longer stomach an actual meal. She would throw up at school every day, and I distinctly remember her nibbling on the corner of a block of peanut brittle one day. I’ll get fat at this rate, she had remarked. This was the moment I realised that she was not the same person I had known, and I became scared.
But all I felt on that bus was a strong, overwhelming sense of guilt. Neither of us had done anything to deserve the disconnection we had undergone. So why does this happen to people, for no real reason? In that moment I wanted nothing more than to walk up to her, and re-introduce myself. Start again, as a friend who would take her for exactly what she was. A friend she deserved. Not one who got selfishly scared when life solidified.
As the bus pulled in, I was still debating whether to approach her and say hello. It had been a while, and yet we were still on reasonably amiable terms. I watched as the people poured out of the bus, keeping my eye out specifically for her. I watched her walk up the hill, in the opposite direction to the majority of others. She turned her head, and suddenly something clicked and everything I had been feeling for the past ten minutes changed.
The person on the bus hadn’t been her at all. In fact, it was actually a boy with incredibly long hair. I smiled to myself and went my own way, sincerely hoping that her life was doing better.
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