Reflections: Longing

[This is a part of my short story series called Reflections. There are three stories that are a part of this series. They are unrelated except for their common setting.]

I see her every day. She enters the bus at the stop after mine. I watch her mesmerized by even the smallest gestures she makes. I don’t know what it is about her. Is it the way she idly runs her fingers through her hair or how she laughs or how she smiles at just about everyone she sees? No. It’s everything about her. She gets off at her college while I wait on route to my own. It’s been this way for a year now.  I have fought the urge to talk to her long enough to believe its best I don’t. Maybe this is how it’s meant to be. Maybe I am just meant to admire her from afar and carry on knowing that we’ll never have those conversations that I have had with her in my head. She probably has them with someone else already. Someone else. And to him the sound of her voice and her laughter must be as commonplace as the sound of birds in morning. But not to me. Isn’t it ironic to long for something enchanting to be commonplace?  Maybe in another life we’re meant to meet and cross the threshold between being strangers to being friends and maybe even more. But for now it’s like we’re separated by a two way glass mirror. I see through the glass and I see her looking my way but on her side she stares at the glass only to see her own reflection.