Reflections

The foggy window reflected Aubrey’s haggard face. Soft cheeks, pale lips, dull blue eyes and smooth black hair floated there like the ghost of a dream. With a sigh, she shifted in her seat, glancing briefly around the inside of the transit bus. So many people she didn’t recognize. So many people in a giant world, all of which couldn’t care less about the other 7 billion.

Why did nobody care? Aubrey wished she knew. Lifting a cold hand, she traced it sleepily into the fog on her window. Perhaps it was bitterness, or desperate sincerity that made her write what she did. Perhaps a sad mixture of both.

“I’m depressed,” she whispered, reading what she had written. Absently she wondered about the people around her. Each the most important person on the planet. So many important people – you wonder how the planet survived.

After a few minutes, the fog on Aubrey’s window clouded her words over. Again her hand went up, and she traced a new thought. This one even truer than the former.

“I’m lonely,” she whispered. Again she glanced slowly around, then back to her window. Reflected in the glass, her face looked very sad. She was just about to write a new message, when her gaze shifted far away. There, in the distance, she saw something strange.

Ghostly words spelling “Me too”. They hovered as if suspended on air. Peering into the glass, Aubrey’s strained to understand the phenomena. She was just about to shake her head, when a hand reached out across the words. A hand! She gasped as the hand waved, and stared at is spelled out a new message:

“Why lonely?”

She blinked. She wrote:

“No friends.”

The hand paused, its fingers slowly curling up, then relaxing. Almost as if a hand could sigh.

“Me neither” it spelled.

“Scared too?” Aubrey wrote.

Again the hand paused, but this time it did not move for a whole minute. Slowly, at last, the fingers waved, as if playing a hesitant scale on the keys of an invisible piano. Decisively, they wrote:

“Yes. But not of you.”

Aubrey smiled.

Then the bus stopped. With many groans and sighs the passengers shifted out of their seats. Aubrey glanced over them briefly, then back at her window.

The hand was gone. Aubrey’s heart plummeted. She had been imagining things again, hadn’t she? Stupid Aubrey.

“Hey.”

Aubrey glanced up sharply. There, standing over her, was a smiling young man.

And she was suddenly scared again. What did he want? For a moment, there was an awkward silence-

Then he sat down next to her. He reached across her. She shrank away, heart pounding. Should she scream? Her eyes followed his hand-

She gasped.

On the window had appeared the word: “Friends?” handwriting identical.

And she understood. Of course! It wasn’t magic – just a reflection! A reflection from across the bus aisle. Slowly she smiled, and she traced the word:

“Yes.”

Perhaps someone in the world did care after all.


(500 words)