The anonymous confessions of a convicted people-watcher and chronicler of passing strangers.

She sighs and runs a hand through her hair, eyebrows pulled in tight, nose all tucked up, a blank page before her. She’s tugging at her brain, trying to coax the words out. The strands of hair that prance about her eyes know she’s fighting a losing battle against the more interesting hustle and bustle of the cafe. There are grand words inside her that won’t settle into a simple sentence and thus evade her pen altogether. The page is waiting impatiently for the essay that’s due in 24, no 23.5hrs, or perhaps it’s the apology she can’t say face to face, a declaration of love, a sketch pad held by uninspired hands. Her eyes glance briefly to the side then they wander up the wall and eventually come to rest on the lost and forlorn bicycle outside, hanging obscurely from a tree.

Have you ever watched a smile move across a crowd? From the corners of the professor’s mouth a cheeky grin escapes into the room, a lame joke, the students groan and sigh. But the smile is persistent, slowly it forces its way onto each face, one by one, in a way that briefly says “Psst! You know you wanna!” It’s a brief moment between the ruffling of papers and the flicker of the powerpoint in which I suddenly realise I’m in a room full of people. But it doesn’t matter how I try or what the lecturer has to say, it’s the boy in the green cap that commands my attention. I force my eyes back onto the page, across the room and out of the window but soon enough they’ve returned to survey his scruffy black hair. There’s a strange lightness to his expression that attracts my gaze. He doesn’t bother to write anything down, in fact he doesn’t seem to have bothered with paper at all, instead he stares attentively at the lecturer, absorbing every word. I feel like he should be writing, why isn’t he taking notes? I wish he would write, then perhaps I could concentrate. Perhaps he’s day dreaming, humming the tune of his new song in his head, he couldn’t possibly be listening could he?

If someone smells horrible, dirty and unsavoury you lean away from them, choose the seat on the other side of the train, pray they get off at the next station and take their scent with them. Such people don’t endear my heart, a reflex action shouts get-away-from-that-smell and I have very little sympathy for wether it’s their fault or not they smell like fish. But when the train glides to a halt and the doors wrench open, fresh air surges into the carriage bringing new passengers and different smells. A suit and briefcase sits down in front of me and the train seems quickly flooded by his after shave. It’s not the heavy smell of an acne faced boy who went crazy with the rexona, but the smell of class, of clean-shaven-next-to-godliness, the very essence of the metropolitan man. Was it his girlfriend or his mother who picked that for him? Maybe it was his father. Certainly he was raised to tuck in his shirt and clean beneath his fingernails by a dignified man, a connoisseur of fine smells. The woman next to him sniffs and then sneezes; she must be allergic to him. What’s more likely, I decide, is that he recently turned 30, and the first of many expensive gifts from his soon to be wife was this head turning aroma. He smoothes his hair down and reaches into his pocket, producing a purple and pink notebook and I reconsider, perhaps it was his boyfriend...

She’s leaving and I’m tempted to follow her, shadow her quiet, meandering gait. Sit next to her on the bus and strike up idle conversation, comment on the weather, the bus system, her furrowed brow. She thrusts her pen into her pocket and ditches the blank paper into the bin as she storms past. Its pale lines have defied her. The loose strands of hair bob jubilantly.

If it’s possible to fall in love with a passing stranger, I must have done it a million times. They are strangers just passing by and only in my day dreams do I go and sit by them, only in my day dreams do they take me by the hand and lead me away.

I am a connoisseur of faces, smiles, frowns and stories, a convicted people-watcher, chronicler of passing strangers.