by Britt Geurts
I met a stranger and in my head, we lived an entire life together. His sun-bleached hair curled away from his face and his long dark eyelashes brushed his cheek with every blink. We made eye contact. His eyes–striking green–seemed to read every one of my thoughts, his eyes.
We’re on our first date. We’re laughing over bad wine and good bread, knees touching beneath the table like they’ve known each other for years. I imagine him asking me if I’d like to see his favourite bookstore. Of course, I say yes. He buys me a battered poetry collection–Pablo Neruda maybe–because I told him once, in this imagined life, that I like love poems even when I don’t believe in them.
He says, “I’ll convince you.”
We fall in love. Slowly at first. Then all at once, in a way that makes the rest of the world feel blurry and too loud. We rent a place with chipped tile and terrible insulation, but it smells like basil and coffee and books, and that’s enough. We fight about the dishes and make up over pancakes. We painted the kitchen yellow because we both agreed that yellow feels like hope.
We marry under a tree somewhere, surrounded by a hundred candles and the few people who really know us. There’s rain in the forecast, but it holds off just long enough for our first dance. All this flashes through my mind in five seconds, before the bus doors open and he steps off. He was a stranger. Still is. It was all in my head. Isn’t it funny how easy it is to imagine a life you don’t have? And yet, that imagined life made an impact that was more real than I could explain at the time. It wasn’t just a fantasy. It was a sudden confrontation with the possibility of connection. How deep it could run, fast it could strike, how little it sometimes has to do with logic or planning.
For someone who overthinks everything, love included, that moment was both beautiful and terrifying. I told my friend about it later, expecting an eye roll.
“So you fell in love with a guy on the bus?” She teased. “Classic.”
But it didn’t feel like a crush. It felt like a glitch in the universe–like someone I knew in another life, just passing through this one. I know how this sounds. I know how easy it is to brush off as a moment of whimsy or romantic delusion. But the truth is, that brief mental spiral, five seconds of seeing a stranger and living a full lifetime with him in my imagination, left a dent in the rhythm of my daily life. It was a moment of raw possibility. We spend so much of our lives curating. Curating our feeds, our dating profiles, our schedules. We decide who we want to be, and we project that outward–clean, edited, composed. In doing so, we sometimes forget that real life isn’t always filtered. The most meaningful experiences often arrive messy and unannounced.
That five-second love story shook something loose in me. It reminded me of how spontaneous we used to be, how we once believed that anything could happen on a Tuesday. A reminder, maybe, of how open we used to be. Before dating apps and algorithms. Before we trained ourselves to swipe past possibilities without giving them a second thought. We forget, in the scroll of the everyday, that our lives can still surprise us. That magic can still happen in the form of a stranger’s eyes meeting yours in a crowded bus. That even a fleeting spark can shift the way you see the world, and yourself in it.
That single moment with a stranger didn’t just leave me daydreaming about love–it recalibrated how I moved through the world. After that day, I started looking up more. Out of my phone. Out of my head. Into faces. I smiled more at strangers. Held eye contact a little longer. I walked more slowly through bookstores. Took more solo coffee breaks. I stopped assuming that nothing significant could happen unless it was scheduled, planned, optimized. I stopped rushing through days like they were something to survive.
I realized how many chances for connection I’d been walking past, head down, earbuds in. That moment on the bus reminded me that life isn’t always about grand gestures or the big stories you tell later. Sometimes, it’s about the possibility tucked inside an ordinary second. The kind you almost miss. For a while, I let myself live in that kind of openness. I said yes more to new people, to last-minute plans, to moments that didn’t promise a story but felt good anyway. I found myself striking up conversations in elevators. I lingered in checkout lines instead of switching queues. I started noticing how someone’s voice cracks when they’re excited, or the way they hold their coffee cup like it’s a ritual. I collected details. I paid attention.
When it came to love, I became a little less afraid. That’s maybe the biggest change. I used to think love had to follow a specific path: coffee, dinner, three months of caution, six months of doubt, and maybe–if you were lucky–a safe kind of settling. But the truth is, love doesn’t always wait for your logic to catch up. It doesn’t care if your timing is off. Sometimes, it hits you like a bus brake. Sudden. Jarring. And gone before you even know what happened.
So no, I never saw him again. I don’t know his name or where he was headed. But I do know what he gave me–unintentionally, silently, in the space of a glance. He reminded me that I still believe in the spark. That I still want to be moved. That somewhere inside me, there’s still a romantic who dares to imagine an entire life with a stranger on a bus. Because that moment taught me a reason to stay open. Not just to love, but to wonder. To possibility. It didn’t turn me into a hopeless romantic. If anything, it made me a hopeful one. And that’s the version of me I’ve decided to keep.
Leave a Reply