The Girl with Such Poise Who Sat Next to Me
“Everybody’s pair of eyes are my mirror, my head is my anchor, and my heart is my compass. It’s never fun.”
The girl who wears a white smoke calf length coat walks on the bus, turning every head toward her effortlessly. She puts the cash prepared in her hands in the farebox next to the driver. Her lips, cherry-colored, curled up into a smile as she looks straight up to the driver, so gracefully and most importantly, friendly.
She turns and starts walking, or more so gliding, in between the crowded seats, so elegantly, that I’m sure it plays out in slow motion in everyone’s heads. Not in a cheesy way, though. More like a drunk conversation flow that is comfortable and familiar, that ending the conversation just leaves you with a sense of warmth.
From the way her self-control exhibited so wonderfully, I imagine she’d be someone who possess an intrepid determination that the world admires. Someone who is proficient in using calmness to cope with disquiet situations. Someone who rises above despair with such forbearance. She must be someone who has a full social calendar, the complete opposite of me who enjoys more of being alone. Hm. And as always, my mind just wanders to a great length to compare myself with another being, a disease that most people suffer from.
I find myself following her eyes as hers catching mine.
So skilful of the mastery of self, her power of elegance radiates through her every move. She smiles at me, twists her body with such ease like clockwork, and slides onto the seat.
The girl that is the epitome of poise sits next to me that morning.
That morning, my head is filled with smudges from a recent past that I still can’t forgo. Cultivating serenity is not an choice that I could easily opt for these days. Though I try hard to hide the grim feelings, but I’m wrapped around by them, forcing myself into my tiny murky, introverted bubble.
The sun is so bright that morning, as if it attempts to bathe all my anxieties and discomfort so I can start clean. But, I keep questioning myself: how do I trust mornings? How do I know that in the morning, the pain would ease, the rain would cease? It’s been a fortnight of mornings since I’ve been feeling this gloomy, but no morning has yet erased it.
I board on the bus and sit by the window. Lately, I would usually listen to this artistic gem from my home country I just discovered a week ago. Yet, I decide just to focus on the bustling crowds and busy streets, people watch the bookstores, restaurants, and office buildings on the other side of the window, letting my mind wander aimlessly, endlessly.
A couple of stops later, that’s when I see her. The girl with such poise that could easily be anybody’s best friend. With her knees held together, ankles crossed, and hands rest on top of the other on her upper legs, she throws a sidelong glance out the window like what I’ve been doing. Such poise, is all I can think about. I try not to have, but there is, as always, a speckle of shame floating above my head of how little I resemble perfection, unlike her.
Yet, once again, that’s just my stubborn mind saying stupid things that I should’ve ignored.
She takes out her phone and opens a message she just received. It’s a really short message, yet she spends more than a minute just staring at it. I do that too. Too often, even. I’d look at a message and not say anything for a certain period of time because I have to craft the perfect response. I have to calculate what would their reply be if I send response A, response B, and so on. Then, I will write my message on the notes app, for I don’t want to them to see the three little anxious dots that would give away too much of me. It’s a constant and tiring restlessness, a habit of self-doubt.
From the corner of my eye, I watch how she types her response, looks at it for a second, and deletes it. She types again. Delete. Type again. Delete. She sighs. I understand.
Maybe she notices how I have been observing her every move. She suddenly turns to me.
“Have you ever thought to yourself that you think too much?”
Her melodious voice wipes a little bit of my lethargy. I immediately smile, thanking her for talking about what I know best.
“Well, as a matter of fact, I am a self-proclaimed avid overthinker.”
She laughs. A laughter that would echo through walls and sends joy to any ear.
“Don’t you just hate it? It bugs me a lot that I do it all the time.”
“I mean, I wish I could hate it. But I live with it, so I just have to… accept it. I guess.”
She nods and stares back at her phone for a moment.
“Doesn’t it get tiring though?” She says that with her gaze still fixed on phone. I accidentally look down to her phone and see what it is that makes her overthink.
Is this what you really want?
I immediately avert my eyes up to hers. I can see through her eyes how distant she feels with the person on that other side of the line.
A lover? A parent? A sibling? A friend?
I don’t know the context whatsoever, but I can tell how hard of a decision she has to make.
I don’t dare to ask.
“It does.” I answer. “It feels heavy, even foul most of the times. It makes me so uninspired because I spend too much time thinking of what could and could not be.”
“I understand. I wasn’t always like this, but I started worrying about everything after I got my heart broken.” Even when saying something so serious, she is still so cheerful, considerate for she doesn’t want to be too whiny in front of me.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. A broken heart can change someone. Every lie whispered softly, every word promised too fast, can easily, and definitely, break someone.”
She forces a smile, trying hard to close the gap with the shadows that pull her downward.
Time has stood still for a while.
The questions that need a one-word answer sometimes are the most difficult ones to answer.
“I really don’t know how to answer this message.”
“Sorry I didn’t mean to see… But, what do you really want?”
She furrows her brows, thinking. Knowing the answer deep down, but at the same time knowing the implication of that particular answer.
“I wish it was as easy as that. To just answer this solely based on what I truly wanted. But it’s not that easy.”
“Yeah… It never is.”
I think about that all the time. How my short answer might unintentionally break someone, not realizing every second of every good day: their heartbeat turns weak; their soul crumbles slowly. How would you live knowing you are responsible of such destruction?
Yet aligned with that, if I answered with something opposed to what I desire, I’d fall down so deep into the abyss, and feel every bone in my body broken that I cannot even hold my own heart, yet I still try to catch someone when they fall so they could remain intact.
How would you answer a question like that?
The bus stops. She looks up to the LED destination sign, noticing she hasn’t paid any attention to her stop. It says Hollywood & Normandie. Thankfully, this isn’t her stop. Nor mine.
“What’s troubling you right now?” I finally ask. Hoping she would at least give something to this stranger.
She thinks for a second there. We both are searching for answers.
I answer that question in my head myself. I have been tossed and thrown lately. I have been walking on the creaky floor that could collapse at any time. I have been holding my breath for so long just so I could come back up to the surface and climb onto the boat, to try re-opening the sails. I keep saying to myself that things are gonna be okay, because this is nothing. What I am dealing isn’t even as grimy as the darkest of times I had gone through before. I will get through whatever I’m feeling. All the loneliness, the anxiety, the insecurities, the sadness will fleet… Right?
But aside from all of that, what troubles me for real is just everything I made in my head.
“I think too much of what people think of me.”
Me too.
“I always try to be sensible, to be logical, to weigh every option possible and what’s the outcome of them. You know, for me and for others.”
Okay… me too.
“But all the rational solutions are always undermined with what my heart wants.”
Soul sisters.
“In short: everybody’s pair of eyes are my mirror, my head is my anchor, and my heart is my compass. It’s never fun.”
I look up at her and then start laughing.
She puts on a wide smile. Confused, but still smiling.
“Why are you laughing?!” She elbows me playfully.
“Because you’re as messed up as I am.”
“Hey!”
But then she starts laughing herself. The people sitting in front of us turn to us, annoyed. I cover my mouth with my hand, holding the laughter in physically. She cover her whole face with both her hands.
“You just basically recited how I feel every day.”
She wipes a little tear from her right eye just as her laughter slowing down. I sigh deeply, trying to catch my breath.
“Thank you, I needed that.” She clutches her phone tighter now.
“I didn’t mean anything bad by saying we’re both messed up. It’s just, I’ve been in an emotional mess these past couple of weeks and I think selfishness has been chewing out my head that I think I’m the only one feeling like this. You seemed like a girl with such poise, who knows what she’s really doing. But it turns out, we’re both are just a couple of lost souls, searching for answers to offer to the world.”
We both create very well-elaborated illusions that might break or make us.
She chuckles listening to my overly melodramatic statement.
“You got that right. People do say that. I may seem like I have my shit together, but trust me, it’s a clutter up here-” she points to her head, “and here,” then to her chest.
I nod in agreement. We both fall back in silence. Processing a string of interim friendship we just weaved together in this city of millions without even knowing each other’s names.
She puts her phone down on her lap. She takes a deep breath.
“We both are in pursuit of something. Hm. I don’t know what. I don’t wanna say love, because it’s so cliché. But I’m sure our pursuit will continue, even with our overthinking hearts and our doubts.”
“Yeah. That’s why we have doubts and worries. Because we exist. That’s who we are,” I said. Trying to be the poet I claimed myself to be.
A beat of friendly silence.
I slowly and carefully suggest a pact between us. “I’ll tell you what. If you answer that message with the answer of what you truly want, with what makes you happy, then I will try to be less of an emotional mess today.”
“Today only? That’s not fair!”
We both laugh softly again.
“Why are we like this? It’s 9 in the morning! This should be a conversation after midnight with a bottle of wine or whiskey.”
“I blame you for starting a dialogue about overthinking on a full Metro bus.”
Laughter again. I haven’t laughed so hard like this for almost two weeks now. Adding this moment to the memories, patching the scrapes that stained there.
Approaching Hollywood and Beverly, the sign announces.
It’s almost my stop. I push the stop request button and pull my backpack straight on my lap.
I stand up, waiting for her to slide out so I could wait at the exit door. Still clutching her phone, she stands up and smiles at me.
“Thank you.” I mean it.
“Likewise. You help me find my answer.”
“I’m glad.”
“I hope you do the same. You know, to love yourself first before anyone else.”
I don’t say anything. I stand by the exit door, which is still not too far from her. I watch her slide in as she sits where I was, right next to the window. She pulls out her phone, types a message, and… The bus stops. That’s my cue. Just before I hop out the bus, she hits send.
“Yes.”
I smile to my co-worker as I pour some brewed coffee into my cup.
“Good. I’m glad you’re feeling better. You do look more lively today.”
“Are you implying I’ve been looking like a zombie before?”
“Pretty much.” He shrugs jokingly and leaves.
I put the wooden stirrer in the cup, stirring my feelings along with this coffee. Mixing the bittersweet taste of that brief encounter, already feeling so nostalgic.
Slowly, I detangle the knots I myself have created.
I smile. Really smile.
This is what I really want.
