sunshine on a rainy day

A week ago I left work late after drinks. I was a bit unsteady on my pins, as my mother would say, and typically, it started raining the second I opened the front door to the office building. By the time I reached my bus stop it was a steady stream of ice-cold water biting into my skin and flattening my hair to my forehead in a damp mess that might at least retain some body heat.

Typically, the buses were not running on time. During peak hour they're supposed to run once every ten minutes but it's not uncommon to see two or three of them bearing down on you at once, packed to the gills with weary looking Muslim women waving cartons of juice for their small children and trying to balance shopping bags on their laps. The buses are hard to spot on this road; it's a busy thoroughfare heading towards the city and it seems to be a favoured route for medium sized trucks weaving in and out of the red-brick industrial buildings that dot the area. If you can't see well to begin with, a large shadow in the distance outlined by lights could easily be your sliver of hope, a place to be warm and one step closer to home.

I'm usually alone at the bus stop but this night a young bloke comes up and leans on the telegraph pole beside me, skateboard under one arm. We started talking, at first about how buses work in different countries - he's been to Chile and Korea, and I've seen a little of Malaysia - and then we talked about guide dogs, and dogs in general. He's a dog walker, which made me feel even more intuitively safe with him than I first did. Not that dog walkers can't be rapists or murderers, but he doesn't look like the pictures in the news of the sexual offender who's been frequenting this area and he isn't drunk or high. It's not just that; he's solid in an internal way that I can't quite explain. Steady. Alert. Easygoing. So good looking and fit I immediately dismissed him as not my type - he wouldn't be looking at me even if I was seriously looking at him. Which I'm not.

Then our conversation turned from polite fiction to something else. He told me he's come here from Perth, and my eyes widen. It explains a lot about his openness with strangers. Our stories tumble out - the way people over there would think nineteen degrees was cold, the way Melbourne people look at you suspiciously if you smile and say hello. The heat. The beating down sun and our favourite places on the other side of an aching desert. Mine is King's Park at night, and although I instinctively remember being up there with the full moon at the time when my heart broke, I also smile at the thought of taking Matt there soon, showing him how I managed to fall in love with a city in one glance. We talked about beaches, and favourite restaurants, and suburb names rolled off our tongues knowingly. It was like crack, the warmth seeping into my veins and making me forget the cold all around.

He got off the bus before I did. We exchanged names and shook hands, and expressed the hope that we'd run into each other again in the dull orange glow on that Friday night highway. I intuitively know that we won't. I was quiet then for the rest of the way home, save for the splashing noises as I went jumping through puddles in the laneway outside our house.