25/08/2026
I started waving at him when I was six years old.
I don't remember deciding to. The way you don't remember deciding most of the things that end up defining you — they just begin, quietly, and then they're simply part of who you are. The Number 7 bus came down our street every morning at seven forty-five, which was exactly when my mother walked me to the corner for school. And the driver — a big man with a grey beard and a hat he wore slightly tilted — looked down from his high window one morning and caught me staring and raised one hand off the wheel.
So I waved back.
And then the next morning I waved first.
And that was that.
His name, I would learn years later, was **Curtis**. But for a long time he was just the bus driver — a fixed point in my mornings, as reliable as the traffic lights and the smell of Mrs. Patterson's coffee drifting from number twelve. Every day at seven forty-five he would come around the corner in his big green bus and I would wave and he would raise that one hand off the wheel and something in my small world would confirm itself.
*Some things stay. Some things show up when they say they will.*
I waved at Curtis through second grade and third. Through the year my parents separated and the mornings felt tilted and strange. Through the year I got glasses and was convinced my life was essentially over. He was always there. Always the same raised hand, the same slight tilt of the hat. Once, in winter, when I was nine and had been crying before school over something I no longer remember, he saw my face through the window and didn't just raise his hand.
He gave me a thumbs up.
It sounds small. It was enormous. I straightened up and walked into school and got through the day.
I waved at Curtis through middle school, when waving at a bus driver should have felt embarrassing but somehow never did — some rituals become too old and too solid to be touched by self-consciousness. Through high school, when my mornings changed and I didn't always catch the seven forty-five but on the days I did, the hand still went up.
And then I went to college. And the mornings changed for good.
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I came back to the street last summer.
Thirty-one years old now. My mother still in the same house, same corner, same traffic lights. I was visiting for a week and on the third morning I walked to the corner for coffee from the shop two blocks down and I was not thinking about anything in particular when I heard the sound of a large engine and looked up.
The Number 7. Seven forty-five.
Still running. After all this time.
I raised my hand. Automatic. Twenty-five years of muscle memory.
And the bus slowed.
It wasn't a stop. There was no stop there. But it slowed, and the window came down, and a man with a grey beard — more grey now, fully grey, but the same hat, still slightly tilted — leaned out and looked at me.
**Curtis** pointed at me. Then he pressed his hand to his chest.
Then he pointed again.
*I remember you.*
I stood on the corner of my childhood with my hand in the air and tears running completely without permission down my face and I laughed — the kind that comes from somewhere deeper than funny.
He gave me a thumbs up.
The bus rolled on.
Some things stay. 🚌