My Junior year in college a few years back, I was having a rough go at things. A few months prior, I'd had a pretty nasty end to a relationship that had been going on for several years. I was over the girl, but still had the hangover, the feeling of being alone and finding yourself after spending so long being co-dependent, and I carried that baggage with me for awhile. I had just transferred from a branch campus to the school's main campus to finish my degree, and then switched majors the first week to an entirely different field. I was in a new place, at a bigger campus, with few friends and none in my new field. It took some adjusting.

Winter came. The days were shorter, the weather was colder, the skies we're gray. I spent most days in a malaise, taking walks around campus between classes, finding comfortable spots for coffee or reading in between work and classes. I was lonely all the time, but that different kind of lonely; that lonely that you feel at a party when you're standing alone, or when you're walking down a busy street with nowhere to go, or when you're sitting in a crowded cafe or creamery, surrounded by conversation, but still by yourself somehow.

Then one day, in early December, I think my last class was cancelled, and for whatever reason I stood at the transit center a few hours earlier than usual. It was only 4 o'clock or so, but the days were short and the weather was overcast, so the gray skies slowly darkened and shades of blue leeched into the clouds in a deepening twilight. Our class schedules were very uniform, so I stood at a transit center far emptier than usual as most students were still on campus were in an ongoing class. I don't remember what I was thinking about, or what I was doing before, or what I did later that night. But I remember the stranger that walked up next to me.

She was my height, with shoulder length blonde hair and dull, blue/gray eyes. She had a pale face and a slim build. The air was softly cold, and she had her hood up. When she walked into my peripheral, I glanced at her, and paramount to all her other features, perhaps noticeable only to others who shared the feeling, was a melancholy smile. A beautiful smile, weak but genuine, made even more so by the subtle cues of her bittersweet disposition. It was the beauty of a smile despite; of the feeling of contentment over exhaustion, of the queer scenario where a person's malaise was pleasant to themselves, maybe as one of the better emotions of all those recently felt.

She stopped at a spot a few feet to my right, in line with me, in a spot far from anyone else. The buses came sparsely during class blocks, only one or two at a time, and they would fill the space at the end of the platform first, so our spot was a short walk from where our busses would be, but I stood a ways down the platform to avoid the crowd. Perhaps that's why she did as well. When I first glanced at her she returned a look, and I smiled a little, and she smiled a little more. They were not pleading smiles, or polite smiles, or ambitious smiles. They were smiles because we felt the same, and could see it in one another, and felt just a little happier for the sense of company and the sense of understanding.

We stood together, about an arm's length apart. It snowed a little. We looked up at the snow, and smiled a little more. We stole glances here and there, and we'd laugh a little when we caught each other. We never said a word to each other, and we only stood for five or so minutes, but that feeling of a different kind of loneliness left me for the first time in recent memory, and it looked like she may have felt the same. Three buses pulled up, and we walked down to them together, and she got on one, and I got on another, and I never saw her again.

Maybe if I had asked her name, we'd have become friends. Maybe if I'd taken the wrong bus on purpose and sat next to her, this would be a story of how I met my girlfriend or fiancee. Maybe if we'd have spoken to each other, we'd have spent the winter together and healed ourselves a little. But none of that happened, and I'm content despite. I never got to know her, but I never got to know her flaws, or her hang-ups, and so to me she's perfect, ephemeral, a kindred spirit that almost feels unreal. In my memory she can be flawless, and our interaction can be beauty, and the scene of snow and red brick and twilight can be art.