A woman stands alone at the bus stop. Back slightly crooked, but chin still up high. Strands of silver weave through her dark hair, and her skin catches ripples in the afternoon light. She glances at me, and for one second, the sternness and creases on her face lighten to give me a barely-there smile. A smile that serves no other purpose other than to greet, to silently say, "I see you. You see me. We are with each other at this moment."

We do not know each other.

We are bound only by this little slip of a moment where we are in the same place at the same time.

I want to run to her. To shake her by her frail shoulders slumped from the weight of the years she carries with her, and I want to ask her⸺no, demand⸺"How? How do you do it?"

Years of heartache. Goodbyes. Seeing lives pass you by each day, each year, and only ever touching barely a fraction of all the people who live and will ever live.

I want to ask⸺

Which is worse? For the soul to wither away before the body can catch up, feeling eternally exhausted in a life that hasn't yet been lived;

or

To watch your body crumple into a crease, a wrinkle, and fall to the ground, hanging on to memories of sounds of crispness, and the sweetness of a freshly plucked maple leaf?

If and when she asks me, "How old are you, dear?"

I will not know how to answer. And really, does it matter? What separates us is the years, but still, we live to feel every emotion just the same. A child who loses his favourite toy can feel the same heartache as a woman who loses her husband, or a grandmother who loses her daughter and has to live to raise a granddaughter who isn't meant to be mothered by anyone other than her own mother.

Only the years separate us. We learn to say, "Back then wasn't all that bad, unlike now," or, "I have known more painful things so a scrape won't make me cry now."

And by God, nothing ever really changes, does it?

Years ago, someone had cried over a baby gone too soon. Yesterday, a mother cradled a teddy bear before placing a white rose on a tombstone with a name carved into the rock. The same name she wrote on a piece of paper in the hospital. Today, I think of a friend I've lost⸺not dead. Just gone, living a life so separate from mine that it is hardly believable that we once made promises of exploring new cities together.

And still, we have to go on.

Go on, or don't go at all and just drop everything away.

Both options have their share of repulsiveness. And so, I am stuck at an impasse.

What do I do?

So I look at this old woman, standing alone, bent from all the years gone by, all the years she is forced to carry. And I don't know her story, but I see marks from where other lives had come too close until little imprints of other people colour and stain her own. I see echoes of other voices, solidified by mist dancing around her ears, and appearing in her own voice and words. I hear in her heartbeat the colour of her mother's eyes and her father's favourite shirt. And I ask her, "How? How do you do it?"

She can give me any answer she likes. I won't care for her answer at all, no matter how eloquently spoken, how gentle her tone, or how similar our minds work that we each predict the next word each other will speak, like clockwork.

Perhaps it is the futility of asking the question that spurs the desire to ask it in the first place.

In the end, she and I board the same bus. We watch the same scenery passing by through the window. She pretends not to notice me crying. I pretend not to shy away every time her shoulder bumps into mine with the rocking of the vehicle.