Awkward Tension

Harold sat still on his bus on a rainy morning. He looked outside at the driplets of water weaving down the window opposite him, and with a start realized that a man was sitting there. Now on any normal occasion, it would not have been any special surprise that, of all places, another man found himself sitting on the public transportation system, but this particular man was watching Harold.

Harold thought to himself that there were really two ways you could watch someone, you could watch them in a discursive passing manner as if surveying a broad landscape, or you could watch them like a painting, absorbing their every detail. This second type of watching was the kind that bothered Harold, especially when it came from someone with no business to be doing so, like the stranger now seated directly across from him.

To make matters worse, the man was not sitting opposite to Harold in the since that they were both looking forwards, eyes averted, but rather facing each other directly across the lane occupying the bus's front; where passengers who joined the bus later in the route found themselves packing in like sardines. This was so irksome to Harold because the man squatted on the only directions in which he could gaze, so his entire field of view was effectively blocked by this interloper. It would of course be both embarrassing and rude of him to match the analytical gaze he now found himself being doused in.

So Harold looked down, and around, and up at the ceiling, really anywhere and everywhere but out of that window he had moments before perused. In doing so he began to assimilate small portions of the staring man's image in closer detail. His boots were made of a pointed black leather. Once they had obviously been quite crisp, in that audacious sort of way that can only be meant to inform everyone just how crisp one's boots are. Now however they bore the long thing white lines that leather seems to acquire after being trod on for years. At their toes were several very small, almost imperceptible holes, and up their length ran a few cracks from the leather slowing drying under stress.

His pant legs were, quite like his shoes, clearly influenced by the passage of time. A pair of once-smooth corduroys, they now had flowing loose threads atop each of their individual pleats. The holes that had slowly been worn into them over time by normal wear were patched up with a medley of brightly colored, striped, and polka dotted pieces of fabric, a gaudy trait that Harold was surprised for not having noticed up until the present.

Perhaps most interesting of all though, was the man's shirt. On its front was emblazoned a shadow image of some face that Harold could almost, but not quite place. It was postured with a slight slant to its left, and flowing hair almost obscured the top of its eyebrows, rolling down around its shoulders and disappearing off of the shirt's canvas.

By this time Harold had begun to take occasional glances at the man's face, and discovered that the watcher was now gazing at the ceiling, the floor, and anything that wasn't Harold.