Dreads

She's an Asian girl, which for me makes guessing her age very difficult.

Back in college I knew two Korean sisters. Once they playfully dared me to guess their ages, and I put them about 10 years younger than they were. They giggled, and I was terribly embarrassed.

So I won't even try to guess this girl's age. But she's young - still in school, apparently, based on what she's carrying - a couple of textbooks on being a dental assistant. She's also got a bag, slung over her shoulder, full of more books.

She's got a bandage on the tip of her finger; I can't help but wonder if she cut it on some poor kid's tooth.

I catch myself meditating on the mystery of youth and education: this young lady is overflowing with potential knowledge and is just on the cusp of real life. Post-secondary education is like that moment when you've just stepped out of your house into the pouring rain and you're struggling to open your new umbrella. But it's still kinda stuck together from being pressed in on itself for months as it sat in a rail container on a boat from China and then in a warehouse and then in a distribution centre and finally on a store shelf... while it's technically 'ready for use,' it's not really ready for use the first time you use it.

There's her stop.

Not being really satisfied with the story she gave me, I look for somebody else.

As soon as he boards the bus I know he's the one. A tall, somewhat intimidating looking mid-30's white man, his hair hangs in dreadlocks about a foot long. He's got a trim moustache and a beard with a ponytail. Yes, the beard has a ponytail. I can't think of another way to describe it. His hair is probably red when it's clean, but it appears brown in its current state.

His glasses are the most remarkable feature: instead of making his eyes look bigger, these are small, thick-rimmed frames with lenses about an inch wide and half an inch high, and they make his eyes look about half their normal size. It's an eerily freaky addendum to his already bizarre appearance.

He heads straight for where the future dental assistant was sitting, and I say to myself, "Please sit there, please sit there..." but he does something rather unexpected. He goes right for where she was sitting - an empty two-seater - but doesn't sit down. He stands right beside a perfectly good empty bench.

He's fairly close to me, so I count the pockets on his khaki cargo pants: sixteen. His shirt is a long, brown corduroy, and he's got a brown trench coat over it all. He seems rather mopey; a bitter soul who has concluded that he can never know joy.

He stands there for the duration of my bus ride, nearly perfectly obstructing my view of the whole bus, and I wonder if he has found me out and dressed so distinctly just so that he would appear odd enough to be noticed and end up on my blog. My mind starts to wander with this idea, and I wonder if he's stalking me.

Nah.

There's my stop. I walk past him as I disembark. My next bus comes within a few minutes and I hop on. My new bus echoes the path of my previous one for a few blocks, and who should board my bus a few stops later but Mr. Dreadlocks. He plods past me, his cloud of gloom wafting behind him.

There's my final stop. He has taken up his standing position again, right beside the rear door. I politely step around him and exit. A few paces later, I happen to look behind me.

He's there.

I quicken my pace for half a block and purposely do not head straight for home. Instead I act as if I'm trying to cross the street, glancing at him out of the corner of my eye. He, too, is looking like he wants to cross the street.

At the last second I spin around and cut through a narrow parking lot. I'm walking faster now, and starting to sweat. I dare a glance behind me, expecting to see him come running at me.

He's there. Running straight towards me, and shouting obscenities. His dreads are whipping side to side as he speeds up, and his tiny little eyes are fixed on me. My heart leaps into my throat, and I burst into a panicked run, wishing that I were in better shape - my side starts to cramp within 30 seconds. He's catching up, and suddenly we're on the ground as he tackles me, a jumble of sweaty, profane, hate...

OK, that last paragraph wasn't true.

But it definitely wasn't boring.