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This is a city, not a village.

There is no dusty, pigeon-filled square where the same faces meet and acknowledge one another each day, no single road through town, no solitary stoplight, no small cafe where people come and go like waves reaching a common shore.

There are a million of us, and we travel and work and eat and talk and do what we do just inches from one another. But I may see you once and then never again, even if we only live a mile apart.

There is endless potential to be anonymous in a crowd.

And I can disappear, even as I am pressed against other bodies on a bus, even as I am smelling the jumble of colognes and lotions scenting the people around me in the elevator.

Even as I am picking through the tomatoes next to a Spanish girl who knows how to find the perfect Roma. Even as I am standing in line and smiling at the barista and saying what I want and getting my change and feeling his hand touch mine for an electric moment.

I am a flash of light or a shadow out of the corner of your eye. And though I was there, you’ll forget me like the seconds-long dream just before you wake.

That’s just how it is.

Or is it?

Because I haven’t forgotten you.

I remember you, standing in line in front of me, appraising the croissants and strudel, in your perfectly pressed suit worth more than half-year of my rent, watch gleaming imperiously at your wrist, hair and skin as smooth as burled wood and lacquer.

Then you glanced back, and I was struck by the very saddest eyes carved into your Michaelangelo face, as broken and bleary and bleak as the sooty windows in an Eastside rooming house. They didn’t match your posture, your presence. They spoke of panic and loneliness and the sharp edge of something I couldn’t possibly understand.

In that single moment, I absorbed a taste of your fear and so I smiled with all the reassurance I could muster, knowing I had less money and less beauty and less poise but perhaps more hope.

You didn’t smile back. You patted my shoulder in an almost fatherly way and sighed to yourself. Then you bought my coffee, wordlessly indicating that this was your plan. I accepted it.

I felt like such a cliche, smiling into your grief. But we gave one another what we had to give. And then you were gone.

Do you know I pray for you when I buy coffee there now?

I remember you, inches shorter than me, years beyond my age, curls whitish-yellow like the ivory handle of my grandfather’s jackknife, skirt carefully hemmed at the knee, perched on your bus seat with a mixture of tenacity and fatigue. I don’t know why the driver was driving the way he was, but I saw you clinging to the smudged steel pole next to you with rope-veined arms and exasperation.

Finally, you said something. You had to.

In all your years of taking the bus, you’d never been tossed around so much. There was no rudeness, no tone of indignance, just incredulity combined with an unspoken request.

It was obvious that your voice had once been music and, though time had added sandpaper and crackle, that you could still sing a fair tune if the mood struck.

But there would be no song just then.

The driver turned to you and asked if you’d ever driven a bus, and you shook your head. No, you’d been an accountant in the tax building on Pender just about forever. You’d taken transit downtown every day for three decades, though, and that counted for something, didn’t it?

He explained to you that he’d worked a split shift and that the pedals were stiff and that all the odds were against him that day, what with all the idiot customers thinking they were the only person on the bus, the only person trying to get anywhere. You sympathized with him, but you still insisted that perhaps he could slow down.

Then he said words to you then that were at once startling and dismissive, the kind of thing you’d never say to anyone’s grandmother, let alone another human being who hadn’t just run over your cat or burned down your house.

And no one even blinked.

Except you.

You absorbed his vitriol with ashen, wet-eyed silence, turning to stare out the window and pick at lint on your sleeve and wonder if you even recognized the world anymore.

It’s okay… I don’t either, sometimes.

I remember you, and you remembered me, because you said my name in the midst of construction noise, loud enough for me to turn and search for the source of the voice and try and place you in my life. Then I had wide eyes in spite of myself because I never thought I’d see you again.

Mostly because I thought you wouldn’t live much longer.

Your jeans were faded and blotched with plaster and paint and grease and a coffee stain down one leg, and your still-childish face was shaded with a layer of fine, sweaty grime. You took off your hardhat and your hair was bleached a duck-feather shade of orangey-yellow, entirely wrong for your complexion but entirely right for your attitude.

You’d been a temporary resident in a friend’s home four years before, parentless but not, bearing the scars of bitter relatives and creepy friends and your own collection of attitudes and shoulder-chips and petty habits. You stole from them, they told me, but they kept you anyway. You yelled at them, threw things, but they kept you anyway.

Then you hit her, and it was time to go.

She was only a decade older than you. She wasn’t ready to be a mom to someone who hated his own mother. She wasn’t ready to deal with everything you blamed the world for. It wasn’t her job to make it all up to you.

I don’t know if anyone could have, anyway.

We’d met a few times, you and I. You’d been rude, too, but I’d matched you snark for snark, making her laugh and making you smile, a worthy foe, a break from all the effort towards your “healing.” I didn’t call you “honey” or indulge you to make reparations for your childhood.

I refused to buy you a frappucino, even when you whined, or watch Korn DVDs instead of the hockey game.

And now we were standing there, you at least a foot taller than me, grinning down, and you reminded me immediately that I’d called you “Annie” because you were a pseudo-orphan with giant hair. I cringed a little because that was what stuck with you.

Then again, you were grinning.

I asked how long you’d been working at that site — months, really? I wondered how many mornings I’d passed by and not seen you with your hammer and safety vest. Things were going well, you said, and you were living with your friends downtown. I remembered those friends and cringed again.

Then you spoke with a different tone.

“I wrote her a letter to say sorry, Meg. And I am.”

It surprised me, these words out of nowhere, even though you were just answering the question that was written in bold across my face. I nodded, saying nothing, but glad that you wanted me to know. Then you had to get back to spreading cement into rough wooden forms, so we exchanged smiles and mumbled some goodbye words.

As I walked away, making a mental note to email her about our conversation, you called out, “It was good to see you!”

Yeah.

This is a city, not a village. There is endless potential to be anonymous in a crowd.

Still, whether I know you or not, we share these sidewalks and skies.

I might never see you again, but sometimes I can’t forget you.

This only happens when I let it happen.

And I should really let it happen more.