I ought to have been home by midnight. Instead, a delayed flight and a departure board of brutal finality left me standing in the station at eleven with a suitcase, a headache and a growing sense of personal injury. The man at the ticket desk, reading my expression with the skill of long practice, mentioned that an old night bus still crawled out to the coast, "if you don't mind company". I minded, rather, but I bought the ticket.
The bus smelled of diesel and oranges. Across the aisle an elderly woman was peeling one with the unhurried precision of a person who had never missed a connection in her life, and without a word she handed me half. At the back two students coaxed a battered guitar toward something resembling a tune, while the driver, who seemed to carry the entire repertoire of humanity in his head, hummed along above the engine's complaints. Somewhere beyond the last suburb I noticed that my sense of injury had quietly got off.
At three in the morning we pulled into a roadside café lit by a single buzzing tube, where strangers passed a vast pot of soup from hand to hand as though we had been neighbors for decades. Then, an hour before dawn, the driver abandoned the main road altogether. "Nobody misses this on my bus," he declared, and he parked at the very edge of a cliff. We climbed out into the cold and watched the sun haul itself up out of the sea, and not one of us spoke. I reached the coast hours late and wholly unrepentant, carrying the finest story I owned.