She sits there everyday, in the same army jacket, the same, black head-phones covering her ears, blasting heavy metal into her brain. Stealing her shockingly-green gaze is the familiar view of the same road we take home on the bus everyday.

Nothing special. Just the same thing that claims my attention everyday.

She looks out her window with her solemn stare, never smiling, never talking to anyone, and no one tries to talk to her. She sits there, as indifferent to my feelings as ever, with the occasional unhappy look directed at the noisiest person on the bus.

No, not unhappy. Disapproving, like somehow it made them lower than maggots to disturb her indifference.

I always watch her from my seat. I watch her never-changing presence and her cold, stiff back as we amble along the icy roads. I've never talked to her, and she’s never, well..... anything. Oh, but I've heard all of the rumors about her. I tend to ignore the nasty ones, but that leaves so few to cling to, in hope that she was at one point in her life, happy.

It occurs to me one day, as I glance down at the slick road, that her life is exactly that: an icy road.

She changes for no one, as does the road. People have tried their salts and sands, tried to defrost her protective coat of icy indifference. People have driven her slick surface, tried to befriend her, but ultimately, everyone hits a bump and crashes into the ditch.

She is scared. If her winter ever ends, if her ice ever melts, people will notice how dirty the snow banks are, all of the previous attempts at a feeble friendship. People will discover all of the potholes she left behind.

So she keeps freezing her road, letting no one defrost her. She stares defiantly out the window, ignoring all of their failing and half-hearted attempts at any relationship. She is winter it’s self, mercilessly freezing any and all warmth. Never releasing its icy grasp of her world.

No one wants her, and she doesn’t want them. Only, she doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know that her every breath sends my stomach flipping, that with every brush of her long eyelash against her cheek my heart thunders in my chest.

No, not only her, but no one knows of my secret, my love for this icy road. My over whelming desire to just sit and talk with her, to have those almost too-green eyes sparkle with laughter as I casually crack a joke. To see her smile beaming at me in my awkwardness and shy personality.

The bus runs over the all too familiar bump in the road on my street. Only a few more seconds before I must calmly collect my bag and go without a word to her. Again. To leave without even trying to walk cross her road of ice. I glimpse her out of the corner of my eye, watching me. I see bright eyes looking at me, examining me as if I might hold some worth. I try to return her gaze, to wave hello, to show any kind of affection to her at all. But all I do is collect my bag and get off the bus.

I guess I have ice on my road as well.