Gary and Anna

Gary never took the bus. He preferred to walk, tracking long, gentle paths down narrow streets in Tirana. He passed bakeries opening their shutters, the smell of warm bread wafting into the morning air. He walked past old men who were arguing about football before breakfast, their voices rising and falling like a song they knew. He passed stray cats stretching in patches of sunlight and shopkeepers sweeping dust from their doorsteps. Walking made sense. It felt safe. Predictable. It kept him in the small world he knew.

But that morning something tugged at him. It wasn’t a thought, precisely. It was more like a low murmur in his chest, a strange impulse — he didn’t usually go through these phases. Not today. Get on the bus.

He frowned at the idea. He hadn’t hopped a bus in years. He didn’t like crowds. He did not feel like being in between strangers. He didn’t enjoy the sound, the hurry, the volatility.

But the pull returned, soft, insistent.

So he listened.

He stepped onto the bus.

It was packed, the sort of morning rush in which all are pressed into each other, elbows brushing, backpacks bumping, the air filled with the smell of strong Albanian coffee and too many perfumes at once. Gary squeezed into that, between a window and a stranger’s shoulder, as he sat in the car, and asked himself why he had felt the need to listen to that odd impulse in the first place.

Then he saw her.

In front of him stood a girl, headphones on, eyes half‑closed, listening to music that surely wasn’t Albanian. Foreign lyrics drifted in and out of her headphones, soft, rhythmic, foreign. She swayed a bit with the music, lost by herself, untouched by the chaos around her.

For a moment that was borrowed and strange, Gary watched her. Not in a creepy sort of way, but as if he were trapped in a very small pause that was not his. It was a different sense of something about her presence. Like she didn’t really belong to the bus, or to the noise, or to the morning. As if she had come from a different story and accidentally stumbled into his.

He said something, “What?” without thinking.

She didn’t react.

Still nothing.

Eventually, she blinked, pulled one headphone out and turned to him, face confused.

“Um… I apologize,” she said. “Did you say something?”

Gary chuckled a little bit with embarrassment. “It’s okay. Just keep listening to the outsiders’ music.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Outsiders?”

“You know… not from here.”

She laughed, a bright, warm sound that brightened the crowded bus instantly.

“I go by Anna,” she said.

He hesitated.

There was a time when he lied like a fool all the time about his name. It was a reflex he had no explanation for, an armor he put on without thinking. He lied about his age, too. Sometimes his job. Sometimes where he lived. Not larger-than-life lies, just ones that kept a human distance.

But something in her made lying feel wrong.

He said "Gary," and in this moment it's true. The truth.

The bus lurched and wheezed, but their conversation found its own cadence.

He shared stories around Tirana’s ancient days, the elusive reasons that the buildings she had turned a hundred times over were hidden. He pointed out a street corner that included the residence of a famous poet, a mural painted three or more times, a café that had been a bookstore before its owner retired.

She seemed genuinely curious, bright-eyed.

She then said she had been in law school for years and she thought she made a great deal of art, but ended up deciding on law because she needed to assist people. She talked about her sketchbook, about the way she drew strangers on buses and in cafés, about how she never lied because lying became a burden she didn’t want to carry.

He nearly choked at that.

The bus kept rolling, stopping and starting, passengers boarding and disembarking. But little did Gary even know it. Around him is the world between them. It narrowed its limit into one place-in-a crowd, just between them, not between Anna and his small unexpected connection in a bus that seems to grow too compact.

When the bus turned into city center passengers on the bus had let themselves and others spill onto the pavement like the water of a dam. First, Anna off, she began to rearrange her bag. Gary, for reasons he couldn’t make sense of, followed.

He was rarely one to ask strangers. He didn’t take risks. He did not move out of the calm routines he had invented for himself.

Only something in him whispered again, that very voice that gave him that bus lift.

“Anna," he shouted at her.

She turned, shocked.

He swallowed. “Do you… want to have coffee sometime? I don’t know why I’m asking. I only think I would regret it if I didn’t.”

Just for a moment she looked at him. Maybe he was being foolish. Maybe she thought he was strange. Maybe she would say no.

But then she smiled, a little, grudgingly, a real smile.

“Okay,” she said. “Coffee sounds nice.”

With one another they walk the street to this little café near Skanderbeg Square. Morning light set long shadows on the pavement. The city hummed with activity, with cars honking, vendors calling out, pigeons flitting around the square, but everything felt somehow softer.

They sat at a little table in the café. Anna ordered a cappuccino; Gary ordered a macchiato he could hardly like and thought he liked but he was lying to himself. They talked about every last thing as well as the least, favorite books, weird dreams, where to go to eat by the lake, the worst teacher of all.

Anna laughed until she nearly spilled her coffee. Gary laughed in his own new way.

Time slipped by unnoticed.

When they managed to get up and leave, the sun was high, the city cacophony, and something inside Gary seemed different. Something in Gary like he didn’t know a door had quietly opened.

They exchanged numbers. Anna waved goodbye. Gary saw her walk away. Headphones returned on, foreign music fading softly as she disappeared into the crowd.

He didn’t know what would happen next.

But he had one certainty:

If he hadn’t taken the bus that morning, he never would have met her.

And for the first time in a long time, he felt grateful for the strange, quiet voice that pushed him toward something new.

Something significant.

Something that seemed like the beginning of a story he wasn’t aware he should have.