People joke that there are two constants in life: death and taxes. For the last five years, in my life, there’s been a third.

The girl on the bus.

I couldn’t tell you the exact date that I first noticed her, only that I’m sure it wasn’t the first time we’d shared the morning commute. I don’t remember what she was wearing, exactly, or what kind of music was playing, or what scent her perfume was. This isn’t a love story. I don’t have those details.

I remember that in the first year, she must still have been in school. Her clothes gave it away, even if the tattered backpack she kept slung over her shoulder hadn’t. Blue jeans, t-shirts, the occasional flannel shirt during the winter. Comfort clothes. Not the type of thing you wear to work, unless you have one of those trendy, hyper-casual internet jobs. Most people don’t.

Sometimes on grey, slushy days she’d wear these big, black boots that reminded me of my art-school years, when everyone was trying to look alternative. I don’t think the girl on the bus was trying to look alternative… I think she was trying to keep her feet dry. The slush and grit would melt on the boots during the ride, and drip slowly down the edges to form little, silty pools at her feet.

After the first year, her wardrobe changed, so I suppose she got a job. The jeans were replaced with slacks, or even the occasional skirt. T-shirts were traded in for blouses. The black boots became a pair of leather pumps. Her hair went from pulled-back-in-a-pony-tail-in-a-rush to short and styled. The morning bus ride didn’t really change much, though, except that now she went one stop further than before — to the transfer station. She’d sit near the front, listening to her walkman, and I’d sit in the back, staring out the window.

That’s how it went for the first year. Maybe two. I can’t remember when it went from looking out the window to looking at her, really. It wasn’t something that happened all at once.

Death. Taxes. The girl on the bus.

She had a quick, sarcastic smile that I would catch a flash of, on occasion; a wry expression that a guy could fall in love with. It’s the little quirks you remember. The cute way one girl will bite her lower lip, or the way another’s breath always hitches when she yawns. You can go years without seeing someone, and then something sets off your memory, and those are the first things you think of.

There are fifteen… twenty million people in this city, and I saw the girl on the bus every single day for five years. I’m pretty sure I did, anyway. I can’t remember a single gap. Five days a week, she was there. I wasn’t kidding about it being constant. It’s really pretty amazing. Come to think of it, what the hell was I doing on that bus every work day for five years? Didn’t either of us ever take a vacation? A sick day? Anything?
I don’t remember the first day I saw her, no, but I remember the first day I got that smile from her. The first day I think she realized that we had been sharing the same space every morning for what was, by then, three years and counting. Not that she’d never noticed me before, or anything, but this time there was recognition, like she understood just how long it had been.

I was sneaking a look, and she happened to glance up and meet my eyes. Her head tilted to the side, just slightly, and then came that smile. It made me dizzy, and I looked away. And that was all, for a while. I was afraid to look at her much after that. I didn’t want her to think I was some kind of pervert.

Of course, this didn’t stop me from constructing fantasies in my head where I talked with the girl on the bus, where we fell in love, where we got married and spent our lives together. It didn’t stop me from fantasizing about her in other, less G-rated ways either.

I guess you worry about people thinking you’re a pervert if that’s what you are.

I had the first stop on the bus, so there were always plenty of seats available. I would tell myself each morning that I was going to sit in front, that if I kept doing that, sooner or later, she’d sit down next to me and maybe we could start a conversation. I had seen her chat with other people on the bus, on occasion. It wasn’t typical, but it’s almost impossible to go three years on a bus and never speak to anyone. Even I’d done it, and I hate talking to people I don’t know.

Every day I’d get on the bus thinking “today’s the day,” and every day I’d walk right to the back and sit down, and stare out the window, until she got on six stops later. Then I’d mostly stare at her.

You know the principle of inertia? A body at rest tends to stay at rest, and all that? That’s me. Not that I don’t move, obviously, since I get on the bus and everything… but what I mean is that sometimes — most of the time — it’s easier to not do anything, than to do something. It’s easier to stay the same than to change. It’s easier to keep walking to the back of the bus and never sit down in that front seat.

It’s easier to imagine that she’d talk to you than it is to find out. You don’t think about it like that, though. It’s not all at the top of your mind like that. It’s this subconscious thing where you go “nah, tomorrow would be better,” and then your brain comes up with a reason why.

Sometimes the reason’s pretty dumb, like I remember one time thinking that I shouldn’t talk to her that day because it was raining out, and the rain gets a lot of people down. Didn’t seem dumb at the time, though. It seemed like a stroke of genius. Sure, wait for the sun to come back. And then come up with a new reason.

It went like that for another year, if you can believe it. Four years this girl and I are sharing a bus, and for at least one of those I’ve been going home at night and thinking about what her nipples might look like, whether her freckles are everywhere or just on her face, how her lips might feel when I kissed them. Four years, and still the only contact has been the occasional glance and that cool, knowing smile.

She wasn’t angry at me, but she knew I was looking. That made it worse, and after a while I couldn’t talk to her, because it had been too long. It’d be ridiculous. “Hey, it took me four years to say hello. How about that rain? I hear it gets a lot of people down.”

She never approached me, either, and I like to pretend that she was disinterested, that she didn’t want to meet me, or talk to me, or get to know me. If those things were true, they would justify my inaction, which is something I’d very much like. No dice, though. Not after yesterday when, up until the end, everything was the same for the last time.

She caught me looking at her again, only a few stops from where she would get off, like she had a hundred times before. Maybe more. I’m using “a hundred” in that way where it’s not so much a number as a shorthand term for “more times than I could count, but less than would justify using some extravagant hyperbole.”

So she caught me, for the hundredth time or the thousandth. This time, though, when she smiled, it was different. It wasn’t the little smirk I’d come to anticipate — so much so that I often hoped she’d catch me looking just to get a glimpse of it. This new smile was sad, and hurt, and empty. It made me want to get up and apologize for whatever I had done to her to make her look like that.

I didn’t get up, though. I didn’t do anything except what I’d done forever: looked out the window and waited to feel her eyes move away from me. Except this time I never felt that, and every time I’d glance back, she was still looking at me, and that sad smile would break out on her face again.

When the bus pulled up to her stop, the girl sighed, and folded her newspaper, and stood to leave. She didn’t look at me, so I watched her go. Normally she would hang a sharp left and wait for the cross-town express. She’d done that every day since finishing school.

Yesterday, she turned right, and moved toward a terminal that only had one word painted above it. “Airport.”

Death and taxes are constants. For five years, the girl on the bus ranked right alongside them, but that’s done now. For the first time I can remember, since noticing her, she’s not here on the bus with me. I’m sitting at the back, looking out the window, three stops past where she would get on. I won’t see her today, or tomorrow, or ever again.

When she smiles in my head now, it’s the smile from yesterday, and I think it always will be. That smile makes me think about inertia. It teases me with what could have been, but never was. It makes me want to change, even though it’s too late. I think you’re supposed to learn from your mistakes. You’re supposed to fight inertia. You’re supposed to change. I let five years slide by and was rewarded with a sad, hurt smile that was the only thing I deserved.

I think about that smile, sitting here on the bus, and wonder who might take her place on these morning commutes in the next five years. I think about that, and I think that tomorrow, maybe, when I get on the bus, I’ll sit down at the front.