peterchayward

True story. I was wearing my purple jumper on a bus once, and noticed a girl wearing both a purple jumper and purple pants. She was cute, I was bored, she looked bored, and I figured our similar clothing was enough of an excuse to start up a conversation.

She welcomed the company, and we quickly got to chatting. We got along quite well, she had a similar sense of humour to mine, and when the bus reached my stop, I gave her one of my business cards, told her to call me some time and we'd organise a time to hang out. Rather to my surprise, I got a text message from her literally as I was getting off the bus.

The text message made me laugh, and I replied straight away. We texted back and forth for a couple of weeks, chatted on the phone a few times, and about a month after the bus trip, decided to meet up.

Our date was interesting; we were eating dinner when her boyfriend came up in conversation. She was telling me how she'd met him. I'm not making this up, they first met when he chained himself to a pig at a protest. She was a hippy, and proud of it.

She made it clear that he wasn't around - he was off at some other protest. I can't recall whether or not it was Greenpeace, but it was definitely in another state, possibly another country. She referred to him as her boyfriend in the present tense, so I assumed that we weren't on a date, just having a "getting to know you" dinner.

It was a great night - we went and saw a band, climbed a tree, had a few drinks. We were halfway up the tree when she remembered that one of her housemates had a performance on, that very minute. Her housemate had been studying circus performance/acrobatics, it was their last class, and they were presenting what they'd learned to their friends and family. The show was a suburb or two away, so we ran like the billy-o and got there just as they were finishing up. It was quite informal, so her housemate was allowed to do his tricks again, just for our benefit.

The acrobats were going out for dinner, and we were invited along, but I motioned that we'd already eaten. She decided to take a much more direct approach. "No," she said, "thanks, but we're on a date."

Honestly, I'm still not 100% sure what the deal was with that.

A bit later, we were walking on a bridge above the train-tracks (talking about how there really weren't any trains, just a lad called Edward paid to stand under the bridge and make train noises) when she told me about her other passion, graffiti.

She pointed out some of her pieces, and talked about her biggest work yet; there was a long, grey pipe running alongside the bridge. She planned to go out there with stencils, and spray paint the entirety of "The Lorax" (her favourite Dr Seuss book, the one with the heavy environmentalist themes) along its length.

It was one of the more interesting nights of my life. She moved a state away shortly after, so we never ended up going out again. She moved down to Newcastle to participate in a week-long protest against chopping down trees or something like that, and decided to stay down there. We texted back and forth for a while, until I lost her number and we fell out of contact.

I have never regretted crossing that aisle and chatting to the strange girl on the bus.

(and if you're curious: no, I didn't end up talking to the girl in the comic. I didn't notice at the time of monologue, but she was listening to her iPod. Casually striking up conversation with another bored passenger is one thing, interrupting someone listening to music is completely different. I did, however, have an interesting conversation with an old man at the bus stop, about the length of women's skirts, and what a funny old world it is that we live in.)