The bus hums beneath me and it feels like the world is moving while I just sit here, forehead almost leaning against the window, earphones tucked in with some soft song I’m not even fully listening to anymore. It’s just there, floating in the background like the score of a movie I didn’t know I was inside. And the breeze slips in through the window, cool against my cheek, and I swear it feels like a hug I didn’t know I needed, like comfort you don’t have to ask for. I close my eyes for a second, just to feel it stronger, and when I open them the sky has changed again.
The clouds are alive, shifting into shapes I’ll never see again, shapes that don’t matter to anyone but me right now. One moment they’re soft animals, the next they’re just pieces of white being dyed with the last glow of the setting sun. It’s golden, then pink, then that dusky in-between colour that makes everything slow down. I catch myself smiling, not for anyone, not even because something is funny just smiling because this exists. Because I get to sit here, in this second, and be a part of it.
And I think how badly I want this to be life every day. Not the endless running, not the constant proving, but this. This bus seat, this music, this air that feels like it belongs to me. I want to wake up knowing I’ll get to feel the wind on my face, that I’ll see the sky change shapes like it’s painting just for me. I don’t need anything louder than this. I don’t need a finish line. I don’t need to win. I just want to exist like this, quietly, softly, fully.
The people around me I don’t even know their names. I probably never will. But their presence is stitched into this moment too. The girl with her hair falling over her face, asleep against the seat in front of me. The man staring out the opposite window, tapping his foot like the song in his head matters more than anything else in the world. The little kid tugging at his mother’s sleeve, pointing excitedly at the sky like he’s discovered it for the first time. They don’t know me. I don’t know them. And yet we’re all here together, alive in the same fleeting seconds. Strangers, background characters, shadows passing in and out of each other’s lives without ever realizing it.
And it hits me how beautiful that is, that I don’t need to know their stories for them to matter in mine. That life isn’t this grand stage where everyone has to be significant. Sometimes they’re just extras, and still they colour the frame I’m standing in. Sometimes their laugh, their yawn, their silence is enough to make me feel less alone.
The world keeps moving, the bus keeps humming, the song in my ears keeps drifting on. And all I can think is this is it. This is life. Not later, not someday. Right here, in this quiet rush of nothingness that somehow feels like everything.
There are more little moments I’ve tucked away, waiting quietly over here at Her Campus at MUJ.