It was 7:13 on a gray Thursday morning in August. The damp air settled like a clammy blanket over the small group of commuters waiting at the bus stop along the main road. It was the same group as always. The same tired faces, the same routines. And in the middle of this predictable grayness, there she stood.
Maja.
I didn’t know her name was Maja. To me, she was simply “her.” For three years, we had shared this morning ritual. I knew she always positioned herself at the far left of the bus shelter. I knew she drank coffee from a red travel mug. I knew she had a tiny, almost invisible scar above her left eyebrow that only appeared when the light hit at a certain angle.
I had spent those three years inventing a life for her. She was an artist, perhaps, or worked in something creative. She had a laugh that was deep and genuine. She loved the sea and old books. In my fantasies, she was everything my own routine existence as a software developer was not. She was color in a world of gray.
At work, I lived in code. Clean, logical structures where everything had a cause and an effect, where bugs could be traced and fixed. But her — her I couldn’t debug. She was a variable I never had access to, a process running parallel to my own without us ever sharing data.
