Routine

I've been getting the same bus every week day for three years. It's an odd thought. Not in the sense that it's unusual to human behavior, i suppose most people have a vigorous routine. But it's odd because i've never noticed. Same bus. Same route. Same time. Same stop. For five out of seven days a week, rain or shine - same old. I only started to notice the unyielding monotony of this experience when it was broken - when she started sharing my bus. Numb to the ins and outs of commuters in London I no longer feared nor revered interactions with travelers. The endless babble of mothers with prams, droning on and on about bottle feeding and zumba fitness. The gaunt faced man with the brown paper bag - mumbling to himself because everyone else has stopped listening. The 'this suit is Armani' commuters paying all their attention instead to the aggressively loud top 40 hits blasting out of their iPhones. All these people were typical, predictable  I knew them in greater depth than I knew the tube map. This girl was different.
   She drifted in on a breath of air. The mechanical doors screamed open and the summer breeze sighed and she came with it. Entering the vehicle in a swirl of blossoms and a gust of summer. Her skin embodied the sun, it was a flawless example of the season itself - iced coffee with chocolate flake freckles. She sat down opposite me. Her hair was a brown cloud, toxic candy floss floating just above her hair line. Defying graity. Her eyes shone out of her face, their emerald contrast gleaming like soft glass embedded  in a sandy shoreline. She averted her gaze from my frozen stare and redirected it at the passing brick and mortar scenery as if it was the most wondrous sight in the world - her eyes racing around her sockets, pupils expanding and shrinking, swallowing to breathe it all in.
   She did not look at me again. Her expression may have remained stony,  uninterested - dead. But her irises exploded from the whites surrounding them like mercury reacting to it's chemical nemesis. It was like she was my atmosphere. As I marveled at her unyielding beauty I became lost within it. I tasted the delicious nectar of her unspoken promise, I danced amongst the butterflies on the breath of a breeze, bounded among the flowers only to be caught up in the beams of a relentless sun and burned into ashes. My death within her was just as wondrous as she, perfection  finality - yet at the same time it couldn't even compare. I was the pauper and she was the queen. Our class divide monstrous yet she was immune to this. She collected the ashes, exhaled them into that sigh of wind and we became one, circling together until we disappeared into cloud.
  I knew behind her cemented expression she was soft to the touch, like a human tootsie roll. I must lick away at her exterior, to get to the beauty within. My love, wholly mine. Her eyes champagne spilling over when I smiled at her, a celebratory oxidized beauty trapped within her - a surplus of it bubbling from the depths of her stomach, regurgitating through her organs and spewing from her mouth like a shower of glee. My love, eyes of wine. Deep rich hues laying flat, swishing within those irises, trapped stagnant during my absence. A vintage merlot, growing ever more delectable with age. The creases around them deeper than those around mine, wisdom beyond my own years. I still relished those eyes though, they would be mine for eternity. She leaned forward and her knee almost brushed my hand. She picked up her satchel and held my gaze and as she exited the bus I saw the ghost of a smile beginning to touch her lips, they curled at the edges like a plastic sheet over an open flame, rapidly deforming into the most tragically beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
  It was at that moment I knew I had to kill her. That smile must only ever belong to me, I'd make sure of it. I'd see her again some day, and then I'd break the routine.