I see her every morning at the bus stop and she is always so beautiful with the opaque ghosts of an ice sculpture swirling from her mouth as her warm breath circulates around her. I’m willing to bet that even her breath smells sweet like honey.

I’m really starting to notice the simple, beautiful things around me, like the sunshine on a crisp cold, autumnal morning, or the frozen crystallised patterns and formations on the top of the car when it has been cold the night before. I even noticed a frozen spider’s web this morning and it was immeasurably and stunningly beautiful. This is of course a mechanism which is used for insidiously catching and killing other organisms, but I was struck by its symmetrical perfection as the morning sunlight glistened on its diamond etched surface. It’s funny how such beautiful, perfect things can be so dangerous and can ultimately result in taking us one step closer to death.

I even whistle an indiscriminate tune to myself as I scrunch across the frosty grass to the bus stop, with the crisp morning paper tucked under my arm, just like any productive member of civil society. I even notice there is a happy little bird perched on a tree branch warbling to itself merrily. I consider bidding it a hearty good morning,  then I realise that I am not in fact living inside a Disney movie and decide it’s best not to, in order to maintain my thin veil of sanity a little while longer.

Now I’m at the bus stop, just like all the rest of them. They are standing around trying to keep warm and they frequently check their watches and comically roll their eyes and tut at each other. Late again, what are these buses like!

Then I see her and she is so beautiful. So beautiful, it is painful. She has a red three quarter length coat on today, matched with little black pumps and a red wooly hat with long, colourful stripey gloves. She looks a bit like Little Red Riding Hood if she had a job in an office and had panache for stylish professional fashion. I just stare and stare at her. Perhaps stare is the wrong word, I long for her, yeah that’s better, I yearn for her, I ache for her and I can barely comprehend her beauty. It’s as though looking at her for too long would burn my retinas and there would be a permanent image of her etched into my consciousness.

She always carries her morning cup of coffee so tightly, as though her little fingers are so cold and fragile that they might snap off at any minute and the hot liquid will spill down her pleated winter coat and stain it, ugly and irreparable. Mere words cannot capture how I feel about this woman and I don’t know how I can have developed such an unhealthy infatuation with someone that I barely know. And that’s just the thing, I am totally aware that thinking about a stranger in such a way is not healthy; it’s not what normal people do. In fact I’m sure it is by definition a bit sinister, but I just know that one day she will be mine and there is nothing that anyone can do to stop it. I will make her mine. And mine she will be