This couple on the bus

     It had taken them years to find each other, but when they did they finally began to know happiness. Each had experienced a life full of the harshest trials which had etched themselves indelibly onto their faces. It was a strange ugliness however. This was not the caustic smoothing or wrinkling of years of alcohol nor the progeria of poverty (which will render a 40 year old with the face of an elder). Not the eternal exhaustion of chronic disease or the hunch and flinch of abuse. No this was a mark separate from all of these: a tiring of the very cells, a concentration of blood to strange areas of the face which gave them a wholly unique and beautiful ugliness.
     It was this, then, that had kept them alone for so long, these marks creating some unknown atavistic fear in those that they met. This indescribable and subliminal wear producing a revulsion in the very genes of the gazer. When they met each other however the mark, this untouchable ugliness, was recognized in the other immediately. And so they sit there, just down the bus from me, silent and smiling in their reward: eachother.