I am at a bus stop, waiting for the bus that takes me back to the valley. I am exhausted from the hectic week before and on the verge of a major burnout. A cigarette is burning at its leisure between my fingers and Chickfactor is playing in my ears but both are temporarily forgotten while my mind wanders off to its usual happy place, a habit I have acquired since realizing that my life is mundane and uneventful.
A dry and croaky dwarflike laugh interrupts my pleasant thoughts and I reluctantly turn towards the source, which it turns out, is a plump and unattractive Filipino woman very much in the prime of her mid-life crisis. She is wearing a silly smile and is jumping – in a manner I can only describe as a sort of indigenous tribal dance – her way towards an even older white man. It doesn’t surprise me that he is fairly attractive or at least he must have been when he was young. It’s a typical pairing these days. He is armed with a cane, which is, I give you ten to one, for his arthritis and is eagerly waiting to be engulfed in her flabby, wrinkly arms. As they embrace and kiss, his caneless hand resting perilously close to her equally flabby and very possibly equally wrinkly bottom, I cringe and look away in horror.
You know when you see an old couple slowly progressing down a street as they hold each other’s hands and you think to yourself that is a scene more worthy to be hung in museums than most impressionistic paintings out there. Well, this isn’t one of those moments.
A man in his thirties, who I presume is her son, joins them shortly. Without so much as a glint of acknowledgement to his mother’s, err, boyfriend interestingly enough, he exchanges a few words with her. He leaves a few minutes after, again without acknowledging the boyfriend.
The couple rub their noses together, happy to be alone again. Well, not alone obviously but I might as well be an insignificant speck of dust as far as they’re concerned. They’re like teenagers who desperately want to sneak a few forbidden moments before going home to their nagging mothers and their indifferent, workaholic fathers; except they’re decades older, their skins have lost elasticity and their parents are long gone. They smile into each other’s eyes, deluded into thinking they're in love when in reality they’re both probably just desperate for attention.
They get up to leave after a few more minutes of impropriety. They pass me, hand-in-hand if you must, and I am left to wait for the bus alone.
Disgusted though I am, I smile too.
It’s my first real smile of the day.
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