He saw me on the bus a year ago for the first time. What more could I ask for? We have lots of those in our city: green and red monsters with commercials on them of some half-naked women holding a bag of chips, or a topless guy transforming into a tiger with an iPod in his hand, stretching all the way to the driver’s cabin. I didn’t have one of those iPods like everyone else. I was going to the other part of town to see my boyfriend. He said I had a sad face and a pink coat on. I remember that coat; I bought it in the kids section of a store back home. He told me I got off, and he never saw me again until last Spring. He never knew my name so he was trying to hook me up with different names. Nothing seemed to be really matching so he always thought of me as the girl on the bus. When we first talked we were both pretty shy, but it felt right. It felt so right. Later, we went to the museum, and he told me about his life. I guess that’s how young people get to know each other; I am not sure, really. I really don’t know how it should be; I only know how it was in my life. In the dimmed rooms of the museum he told me how he saw me on that bus, and how he even wanted to follow me.

Then he told me this story about when he was 20 years old or so he got drunk at a party and some crackhead found him puking in his bedroom, then kicked him out and started rolling him down the stairs and jumping on his head like crazy, until somebody noticed and knocked the guy off him. He was taken to the hospital and remained in a coma for 27 long hours. When he woke up in the hospital with the tubes down his throat, his whole family was around him. He saw the room flooded with tears, and he barely saw the floor.

Since we moved in together, he thinks he lives in a dream. Though we really don’t have much: just an old table, a chair, and a squeaky wardrobe, that he had inherited from his grandma. We don’t even have our own bed. But he still thinks he lives in a dream ‘cause I’m here, and he doesn’t really mind sleeping on the floor. You know, because I am that girl on the bus that he had been thinking about in the unbearable dry nights of summer, sweating in his bed and in the cold grey mornings of the Autumn. He says that that night in the hospital he probably never woke up, and the life he’s living now is most likely a dream, just like me. I told him that I am pretty sure I’m real; I even called my mom, back home, to make sure.

“You know I never liked him,” she told me. “You could have been with that lawyer you met. Now you’re destined to live with this obnoxious person, who saw you on the BUS! Who meets on the bus, anyways? Normal people at least meet in cafes and libraries!” I didn’t listen to her much. She was probably drinking. Yes, I am pretty sure she was buzzed on wine that time. But that line about the bus being an inappropriate place to meet still kind of shook me up.

I have never doubted I was real, and I’ve especially never dreamed to be a part of someone’s extended life. How bad does that sound? To be on this earth, just to be a part of his extended life, if he could have survived.

No, I never doubted I’m real, until one day. I was buying groceries in the corner store down the road. It was rather late in the evening. With two full paper bags, I hopped on the coming bus. The bus had a huge picture on it, it wasn’t nude or anything, I think it was some kind of a Peace Corps ad with a kid from Africa on it. His face was dirty; I guess they didn’t clean it for a rather long time.

I got on the bus and sat down beside some guy with a huge fluffy red beard, wearing a checkered shirt. We took off, and I looked out of the window, watching people and houses slowly accelerating away from me. I was thinking how I would come home and put away the groceries, working everything out in my head, step by step. At some point I heard the squeak of the brakes and felt the bus inclining, and then everything went black. All I remember were the screams of the pregnant girl that sat in front and the meditative murmurs of the guy next to me.

I woke up in the hospital room. My mom happily jumped out of her armchair.

“Are you alright?” she asked with her tearful eyes inside her wrinkled face. “I am so glad you’re fine,” she wept, “I was so worried about you. When the police called me, I thought I was going to pass out.”

I looked at her gray hair, her worried face, and the way her eyes were swollen from the night of crying as she continued:

“Oh lord, I was so stressed out. And now that you are here, alive, I am so grateful. I thought I would just give up. You know there’s been a lot going on in here. I’ve been talking to the parents of the guy next door. He arrived yesterday, right before you. They say he was beat up at a party or something. And he never woke up.”

I looked at the corner of the room where two coats were hanging on the hook. One was obviously my mom’s. It was beige, her favorite color. The other coat, I didn’t recognize.

“Whose coat is that?” I asked her.

“Yours,” she looked at me strangely. “That’s your coat, darling. It didn’t get even a single tear in the accident.”

“What about my pink coat?”

“What pink coat?” she paused “You don’t have a pink coat.” I noticed a slight look of shock on her face. Maybe she feared I had brain damage or something, so I decided not to continue asking my stupid questions. I asked her about things at work, listened to her talk, and held her warm hand. My mind was racing. The reality that I had just now: the life with crazy buses, my pink coat, and love just crumbled in front of my eyes like a fragile pie. I never had this pink coat, and I probably never had him, because I’m sure he’d be here with me right now, and he’s not here. It suddenly crossed my mind that the story of the guy laying next door is one I have already heard.

When my mom went back to work, I quietly slipped out of bed, my toes barely touching the cold linoleum floor. I looked around, slowly turning the handle of the door next to mine.

And there I was beside his white bed, where he lay unconscious like he never ever lived before and doesn’t know how to do it again. I looked at him, remembering the day he saw me on the bus, and the dimmed lights of the museum, where we once walked. Or was it a dream? Our life together, my pink coat, and those crazy pictures on those buses; were they a reality? I lost myself in these questions.

His mother was murmuring some kind of a prayer; I can’t really tell what it is. His dad was standing in the corner, looking down on his toes soaking in the salty water of grief. I hate the cleanliness of this room. So sterile, it disgusts me, every fucking inch of it. I look at the clock on the corner table. It’s been 26 hours 59 minutes. I’m waiting.