Once, I met a man named MyungSoo, and he took me on a bike ride. I had lost my train pass, so he introduced himself and offered me a lift. He had messy, dark brown hair and stretched out, mundane clothing on. There was something disarming about the utter lack of stature in his appearance, and my boss had just fired me, so I said yes, took off my work shoes and jammed them in my bag, and got on his basket seat. I wrapped my arms around his waist and told him a place to drop me off a few blocks from my house

He was utterly unremarkable. Adjectives were hard to attatch to him; nothing about him glistened or sparkled. He was an oddity of blandness, with nothing that stood out about him against the harsh cacophony of the city.

“Let me tell you a story,” he said, and I sighed while clutching his waist, lamenting that I had gotten onto the bike of a lunatic and that he would end up mailing my parts all over the country. His story was almost disappointingly mild at first. He told me about his sister and how she was growing up so fast and how she could already count. As a working woman, you get used to these stories, to people shoving photos of their obnoxious children in your face and foisting anecdotes upon you, so my heart rate slowed down and I began listening to the sounds of traffic while words floated in and around my ears about MyungSoo’s sister’s little fumbling pronunciation and so on.

I started paying attention again when the blaring horns occurred to me, and once they penetrated my mind’s wandering, I felt how fast we were going and watched MyungSoo weaving in and out of traffic. The thought about his murdering me had been somewhat sarcastic, but it became realer as he cut through fenders like lightning though butter and skid past red lights. I held on to his waist a little tighter, looking for an opening in his words to ask him to slow down.

“It’s an interesting thing to watch someone die,” he’s saying, and my heart almost stops. Cars are squealing in indignant rage at him, but he seems not to hear it. “You watch whatever it is that keeps us moving flutter around in them for a second, and then start to fade away. And then kind of like water slipping through your fingers, there’s nothing you can do to make it come back. You can only sit there and watch the mess that it’s making. I saw my sister get hit by a car three years ago, and since then I’ve never been able to drive.” I fight the urge to let go of him and fall across the pavement. He begins to slow down, and I realize the familiarity of my surroundings. We hit a sharp stop at the intersection that I told him to leave me at, and shakily I get off of the bike.

He’s looking at me blankly, as though he didn’t just say something horrifying. I can only stand there awkwardly, glued by the unexpected and inappropriate intimacy of the moment. I lied before. MyungSoo is a very handsome man, but the fatigue in his face hides it at first glance.

“But everything is supposed to happen for a reason, right? And if I had been in a car before, I probably wouldn’t have stopped to pick you up and you would have had to walk all the way here.” He starts pedaling again. “Have a good day!”

There was nothing cheerful or happy about MyungSoo, indeed only something deeply wounded, and the loose collar of his shirt has stayed with me ever since. I wonder if he says that spiel to everyone he gives bike rides to, and then I secretly hope that he doesn’t and that something personal had passed between him and me.