Rain in September

Rain in September

By Mahboob Khan

It always started raining the moment the bus arrived.

Not the violent kind of rain. Not the kind that soaks your bones and makes your shoes squeak. September rain was different—light, persistent, like the sky was sighing.

She always got on at 7:42.

Same stop. Same seat—third from the back, window side. Hair tucked under a cream-colored scarf. Book in hand. A soft frown that said she was lost somewhere far from this wet city street.

I noticed her the first week I started taking the route. I wouldn’t say she was striking, not in the way people usually mean. But something about her made you want to look twice. Not out of attraction—more like curiosity. Like you were looking at a puzzle with a missing piece and didn’t realize until then how much you wanted to solve it.

She never looked up when I boarded. Never smiled. Never made eye contact. She just turned the page and let the rain draw quiet lines down the window beside her.

So I sat across from her.

Not directly—two seats forward, across the aisle. Enough to see her without making it obvious.

Every morning, five days a week, for almost three months, we shared that silence.

I never said a word.

Neither did she.

But in the quiet, something started to build. The kind of thing that only grows in stillness. A slow understanding. A rhythm. Two strangers sharing time, space, and rain without needing to fill the air with words.

I started noticing things.

She always read with one finger lightly resting on the paragraph she was on, like the words might float away. She wore the same scarf three days a week, and it had a tiny snag in the hem that she twisted when she was nervous. Her shoes were always clean, even when the sidewalks weren’t.

Sometimes I’d see her smile—never at me, always at her book. It was a quiet kind of smile, like whatever line she read touched something private and warm.

And sometimes I wondered what it would be like to make her smile like that.

But I never spoke.

Maybe I was afraid I’d break the spell. That the quiet magic of those shared mornings would vanish if I forced it into something louder.

Then, one day in late November, she wasn’t there.

The bus stopped. Doors opened. Rain fell. But the seat remained empty.

I waited the next day. And the next. Still nothing.

The mornings felt wrong. The bus seat across from me might as well have been a billboard flashing “Missing.”

I realized, in the cruel way life sometimes reminds us, that I didn’t even know her name.

A week later, she returned.

But she didn’t sit by the window.

She sat near the front, closer to the door, with a folded envelope in her hand. I barely recognized her at first—no scarf, different coat, eyes swollen like she'd been crying for days.

At her stop, just before getting off, she stood, walked straight to me, and handed me the envelope.

No words.

Just a faint, tired smile.

Then she was gone again.

I waited until the bus turned the corner and the rain started again—like it knew it had to fill the silence she left behind.

Inside the envelope was a letter.

Handwritten. Neat. Precise.

"To the man who sat across from me every morning,

You don’t know me. Not really. And yet, you became the safest part of my day.

In the silence, I watched you too. The way you always rubbed your thumb against your palm when you were nervous. The way you smiled when someone offered their seat to an older passenger. The way you looked at me—not with expectation, but with quiet kindness.

I wanted to say something. I was just never ready. And now I have to leave the city.

But I didn’t want to leave without saying thank you.

For noticing me.

For sitting close enough that I didn’t feel alone.

For being part of a story I’ll always remember.

— Yours in silence,

The girl with the cream-colored scarf."

I still ride the same bus.

Sometimes I catch myself glancing at that third seat from the back, expecting her to be there.

She isn’t.

But when it rains, the way it only seems to in September, I feel a little less alone.

And somehow, that’s enough.

I also uploaded Her POV go and check it out