The story
For four years I took the same bus to work at 7:20 every morning.
A woman of about seventy got on two stops after me.
She always sat in the third seat on the left.
She always had a cloth bag with vegetables in it.
We never spoke, not once in four years.
But we nodded at each other every morning.
One morning in March she was not there.
I thought she was ill, or visiting family.
She was not there the next day either, or the day after that.
After two weeks I understood that she was not coming back.
I do not know her name. I do not know what happened.
I only know that a seat on the left is empty every morning.
It surprised me how much this affected me.
You can share four years with somebody and never say a word.