Meeting new people

I consider myself the kind of person who doesn't attract other people. Not that I repel people. Just that out in public, I'm not the person that a talker come up to. I'm bad at conversations and I think other people sense this. That's good for me because I mostly enjoy listening to other people talk.

But the last 2 days thing have been different.

Yesterday afternoon I was waiting at the bus station and smoking a cigarette when a chubby woman in her late 40s came up to me and started talking about how she almost missed her bus earlier and how she had an argument with the driver. She told me the whole story and we talked about busses in general plus the weather and the tornado that rolled through the area on June 1st. She was clearly a little "off" but not so strange or crazy that I felt like making a run for it or politely finding another place to wait. She was nice and harmless.

Today, a the same place, the same thing happened. I feel so popular. I was talking to this guy that I had talked to before when this other guy came up to ask the other guy what time it was. The new guy mentioned that he'd just gotten out of prison and we congratulated him. Then a funny thing happened. Of the two of us, the jailbird started talking to me. The other guy ended up drifting off and Anthony told me about how he liked to work on, and race, cars and how big his 3 year old son was. I know nothing about cars but it was interesting and I pretended that I knew what he was talking about. Turns out that he started with one kind of car and added parts from another kind of car and modified everything.

He's 22 years old and he was very happy when I said that I'd thought that he was 25. He said that's because he's matured now. He's learned to forgive his father and other people who've hurt him and because of that he's able to forgive himself. I said that's a good way to be. It's healthy.

Turns out that he was taking the same bus and that we live in the same part of the city- on the edge of town. I got on the bus first. I'd hoped that he'd sit near and, in fact, he sat right next to me and we talked the entire time. I was disappointed when he got off the bus before its final stop but he had somewhere else he had to go.

I'm hoping that we'll run into each other again. He might be trouble, but he seems like a good person.